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VectorLinux 5.9 - Will It Be Pandemic? E-mail
Written by Administrator   
Monday, 31 December 2007

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Another Christmas, Another Home Run

 

With seven stable releases  of VectorLinux Standard Gold edition  under their belts, the developers  of VectorLinux  have released the  much-awaited VectorLinux 5.9 Standard Gold edition on the 21st of December 2007 to the joy of many Vectorians. Well, in case you  are not aware of VectorLinux,  it is  another  immensely popular Xfce-based Linux distribution in the GNU/Linux world.  It originates from Canada and focuses on speed, stability and choice.  It's designed to run well  even on low-resources  compatible  Intel or AMD x86  hardwares. Other than the announcement of  the new release, its website, vectorlinux.com also provide many screenshots  of  the new VectorLinux 5.9  Standard Gold  or  just called VectorLinux 5.9.  While you are there,  you may want  to check out its CD store for the Deluxe version.

 

 

 

Larger Iso Image, More Choices

 

When the previous iso image of VectorLinux  5.8 Standard Gold was released a year ago, just before Christmas, it weighed only 551MB. Now, the new VectorLinux 5.9 weighs at 676MB. While VectorLinux 5.8 was based on Slackware 11, VectorLinux 5.9 is now based on Slackware 12. VectorLinux 5.9 comes with quite an impressive system components. They are the Linux kernel 2.6.22.14, gcc 4.1.2, glibc 2.5, X.Org 7.3, fully customized Xfce 4.4.2, Fluxbox and Jwm. Unlike VectorLinux 5.8, the new VectorLinux 5.9 comes packed with much more softwares in its bigger iso image, which also augurs well with its goal of providing users with a plethora of choices.

 

 

 

The First Stage Of Installation

(Preparing The Partitions And Copying Of Data)

Installation was bug-free using the same text mode installer which looked like the one used in Zenwalk. This phase of the installation involves selecting the root and swap partitions. If they are not available, cfdisk is available for you to prepare the needed partitions. This first stage of installation also involves selecting the bulk packages & optional packages, mounting of additional partition, checking the installation files, and of course the installation proper. You can still see the name of the founder of VectorLinux and also the names of the developers being displayed on the screen while VectorLinux data is being copied to the hard disk.

 

For users who have limited hard disk spaces, the installer will  also allow them to omit any of the bulk packages (eg. X11 bulk, development bulk, kernel-source bulk) and also will allow them to omit any of the optional packages (eg. Firefox, Opera, Dillo, Transmission, Fluxbox, Jwm, Acroread, Mplayer, K3b, ATI source, Nvidia source CUPS, hplip, etc).  For a complete installation of VectorLinux 5.9, about 3GB of space is needed. For this review I installed VectorLinux 5.9 on an old  Dell desktop and a new Compaq Presario notebook. It only took 29 minutes to copy the data to the hard disk of my old Dell desktop with Pentium III CPU with a RAM of only 128MB. Not surprisingly, the copying of data took only 19 minutes on my recent Compaq Presario notebook with Turion 64x2 CPU and a RAM of 1GB.

 

 

 

The Second Stage Of Installation

(A Lot Of Configuring Tasks)

During this phase of installation, the keymap, time zone, hardware, network, sound and X-window GUI will be configured. You will also be given the chance to trim down the hardware initializations. It is here that you will be required to set up the root user and ordinary user accounts. The configurations are either semi or fully auto-configured. During this phase of installation you would be able to see the traditional slogan of "Vector Linux .... at the speed of light" displayed on the left-upper corner of the configuration screen.


As my Compaq Presario notebook contain the Nvidia Geforce Go 6150 graphic card, I was offered to use either a proprietary or an open source Nvidia driver during the configuration of the X server via the new VXCONF utility program.  Besides letting you choose the type of driver that you prefer,  the new VXCONF utility program also allows you to enter the correct parameters for your monitor resolution. However, you can also use its existing fully automatic X server configuration utility. I found that this auto-configuration utility to be not very efficient since the days of VectorLinux 5.8.


 

 

 

VLinit At The Speed Of Light

One of the improvements to VectorLinux 5.9, according to the developers, is the shorter boot time and shut down time. Well, the VLinit system is working as expected on my two test PCs!  The boot time was 59 seconds for VectorLinux 5.8 while it was 55 seconds with the new VectorLinux 5.9 on my old Dell PC. On my recent Compaq Presario notebook with Turion 64x2 CPU. The boot time was impressively fast. the boot time was 41 seconds with VectorLinux 5.9 and 46 seconds with the older VectorLinux 5.8. However, there is no significant difference with the shut down time between VectorLinux 5.9 and 5.8. It's between 13 to 14 seconds.


 

 

 

Better Artworks And Neater Desktop

I was able to surf the Internet once I logged into the my old Dell PC desktop and my recent Compaq Presario notebook, via the 3COM and NFORCE MCP51 wired ethernet adapter respectively. The Seamonkey browser is still the default Internet browser for VectorLinux. Although there is only a small improvement in the artwork of the Lilo boot menu, you will be greeted by excellent-looking artworks in the boot splash, enterprise-looking KDM login screen, better-themed Xfce splash and a neater Xfce desktop. The Vista-Inspirate icons also look much better than the ones in VectorLinux 5.8. The fonts definitely look sharper too. Well polished!

 

The VL-rockface wallpaper is strikingly different from the blueray wallpaper of VectorLinux 5.8. Though better, I think the developer could have chosen a better wallpaper from their collection. The desktop is cleaner than that of version 5.8. There are only 6 icons (Home, Help Forum, Vector-Docs, File System, Trash, VASMCC) displayed on the desktop.

 

My removable devices like pendrives  were professionally handled by HAL and their contents were automatically displayed by Thunar, the default file manager. If you are dual-booting with Windows Vista, you will automatically have read/write access to your NTFS partition provided that you had mounted it in /mnt/win directory during the installation of VectorLinux 5.9. This capability is enabled by the latest fuse and NTFS-3G (1.913) userspace driver.

 


VectorLinux 5.9  Xfce desktop  with  the new and more appealing  theme.  You can also 

easily enable the  translucency effect.
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The desktop panel  of VectorLinux 5.9 has two shortcuts. In VectorLinux 5.8, there was only

one shortcut.  The new shortcut is for the Super File Manager. 

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Xfce4, Fluxbox, Jvm, Wbar

It's about time that VectorLinux offer even more less resource-intensive X windows managers since speed is a very important part of the goal of the VectorLinux project. In this new version of VectorLinux 5.9,  other than the default Xfce, you will also be provided with the lighter Fluxbox and the Jwm window managers. I found the new and bigger start menu button of the Xfce desktop aesthetically pleasing.  At first glance, the blue-coloured button made me feel like I was in a KDE or GNOME desktop environment. I also found the Jwm desktop environment attractive and the Fluxbox desktop environment cute with the default presence of the Mac OSX-like program launch bar called wbar. Kudos to the developers for a balanced investment on the Xfce, Fluxbox and Jvm desktop environments.

 

 


Up-To-Date Application Softwares


The latest popular applications bundled into VectorLinux 5.9 are Firefox 2.0.0.11, Seamonkey Internet Suite 1.1.7, Opera 9.5.0 beta1, Abiword 2.5.2, Gnumeric 1.7.12, K3b 1.0.3 and Pidgin 2.2.1. In the Graphics category of software, you have mtPaint, gtkam and GQview, but, surprisingly no Gimp! Multimedia-wise, you will not have problems playing many open source and proprietary audio/video media formats with MPlayer 1.0rc2. Be it Ogg, Wmv, Mp3, Mpeg, DivX, Quicktime, or Real media files.  As a matter of fact, the playback of encrypted DVD movies are also supported!

 

The Java and Flash plugins are well integrated into the Firefox to enhance user experience on the Internet. I had no problem while surfing the YouTube and  I had no problem running the Logmein Java applet with Firefox. Although Adobe Reader was not available in VectorLinux 5.8, Adobe Reader 8 is now installed by default in VectorLinux 5.9.

 

The games bundled into VectorLinux 5.9 are PPRacer, Pysol, Mega Mario, Bubble and Chromium. By the way, Bluefish editor version 1.0.7 is the  only developmental package in the Xfce menus. Transmission 0.82 is also available for handling torrents while gFTP is the default FTP client.

 

 

 

New Friendly And Effective Tools

Realizing the lacuna of an out-of-the-box Wi-Fi support on Vector Linux, the team of  developers have creatively designed a very intuitive Wi-Fi network configuration utility  called VLwifi. Configuring my Compaq Presario notebook's Dell 1390 miniPC wlan adapter (with Broadcom's bcm4311 wlan chipset) to connect to the wireless router via WPA-PSK encryption was very easy. It is so much easier to setup a Wi-Fi connection with the new VLwifi than the traditional WiFi-Radar.

 

In addition to the out-of-the-box support for the Broadcom's bcm43xx-based wlan chipset, VectorLinux 5.9 also supports the IPW2100, IPW2200 and IPW3945-based Intel Centrino wlan chipset. Other than this improvement from a notebook's perspective, also included is TuxOnIce to help solve standby and hibernation problems.Below is the sequence of events that took place when I launched the VLwifi utility.

 

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More Polished VASM

After  using the text-mode VASM control center for quite some time, the developers have finally given us a better-looking control center, the VASMCC.  The new VASMCC is really just a graphical front-end to the old VASM which allows the users to control the network, hardware, X window, user, file system and services. The new VASMCC is definitely more intuitive and strain-proof to the eyes.



This is the new VASMCC and old VASM.

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More Fun In Package Management


Gslapt/slapt-get system is used in the management of VectorLinux 5.9's TLZ packages. It has more than a thousand of software packages in its repository. By the way, you can also get Amarok 1.4.7 and OpenOffice.org 2.3.1 suite of office programs in the official VectorLinux 5.9 repository. Users can use Vpackager 1.0.1 rc2 to build binary packages from the source packages that meet the packaging standards of Vector Linux. You can also  build packages from the source with the GUI front-end of the cruxports4slack (the new feature of the new version of Vpackager). However, not all packages built from the cruxport4slack  is compatible with  VectorLinux.



This is Gslapt.  You can also see the wbar in this screenshot.

 

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This is the Vpackager with the newly added cruxports4slack.

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I installed the latest Virtualbox 1.5.2 OSE from the cruxports4slack

via the Vpackager. Installation failed due to toolchain problem. 

 

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SIMPLY IRRESISTIBLE

Overall, VectorLinux 5.9 Standard Gold is a very functional release. It looks a lot better than the previous version. I did not encounter any major glitches during the testing. It was a delightful experience seeing the faster boot time of VectorLinux 5.9, as compared to  VectorLinux 5.8. The softwares seem snappier and more stable than the ones in version 5.8 too!


It's definitely worth to upgrade to version 5.9. Configuration of the X server is very much better and effective with this new version of VectorLinux. Notebook-wise,  its spectacular WiFi configuration utility is another very positive element. I hope that the developers will extend further the capabilities of VASMCC, not just happy with its better look. Maybe all of the custom tools made by the VectorLinux developers should be included in the VASMCC.

 

Another thing that I am happy about VectorLinux 5.9 is that it has got a better detection of other operating systems on the same hard disk. For example, on my Compaq Presario notebook, Lilo allowed me to access Windows Vista, Mandriva 2008 and Mandriva 2007, without me having to edit the lilo.conf file.

 

So, will VectorLinux 5.9 Standard Gold achieve a pandemic uptake? I think not as yet! The archilles'  heels are still  the small number of packages in the repositories, the not-so-simple installation routine, and also the lack of user-friendly power management tool.  But the developers are definitely in the right vector (in magnitude and direction).


Thank you for reading my review.

 

 

 

 

 

On behalf of Linuxseekers.com, I would like

to wish the visitors of Linuxseekers.com  A

Happy And Prosperous New Year 2008.

 

 

By Michael Shee Choon Beng.

This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

 


Comments
Add NewSearch
Mike   | 68.164.128. | 2008-02-13 15:17:19
Thanks for the info. here. I am using Vector 5.1 now with IceWM. I suppose i might have to get the deluxe edition to get IceWM, but if it's like 5.1 it is worth every penny. It works good and looks good. I'm also anxious to try the wireless on my laptop. This should be fun. mike
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