Well I spent about 3-4 hours the last couple of days installing vectorlinux, probably the smallest really usable Linux distro. Blurb from the website - "The Vector Linux team is proud to announce that Vector Linux 2.0 has just been unleashed on the unsuspecting computer world. Hold on to your hats boys and girls this distro really rocks with the 2.4.5 kernel, glibc-2.2.3, sysV style init, gcc-2.95.3, XFree-4.1, and two X desktop systems to choose from" (IceWm and XFCE). Go to http://www.ibiblio.org/vectorlinux I give this a B+ rating based on my experiences. The distro is based loosely on slackware, and you can upgrade using slackware packages. They've stripped out all of the fat. Here's the size of the distros I currently run, and Mandrake is comparable to Caldera in size vectorlinux 397393 blocks (including 2.4.5 kernel source addition, still needs a few devlopment libraries) Gentoo 1530016 blocks (including gnome, KDE, and Opera, and several copies of kernel source) Caldera 3.1 beta 3009180 blocks (including Opera and several copies of kernel source) They have an install for Win Idiots and a Linux to linux install; I chose the latter. You need two fs to install - one to hold the downloaded files (2 of them) and one to hold the installed vectorlinux system. I chose the pentium version (problem see below) because the 386 version offers only XFree86 3.3.6 (boo, hiss). I preallocated my fs before install, but you can do it on the fly during install by using an alternate console. You unzip one of the two downloaded files; generate boot and root floppies; then boot from floppy (slackware anyone?) Once you enter the setup program, the program will offer to verify the integrity of your download (the other file) before installing. Once the main file has been untarred to your target fs (no, reiserfs not supported yet - boo, hiss), you aanser a few questions then follow a menu selection to configure mouse - keyboard - NIC - dhcp - modem - X - etc (this too looks slackware). After using the floppy to reboot your new system, you are presented with the offer to generate Lilo (no grub, apparently). I departed from the install instructions here. I do all Lilo work from my Gentoo distro after mounting the appropriate fs. First problem - the kernel would not boot (not too surprising; it's a pentium distro, after all). So, I booted Gentoo and copied over my 2.4.4-ac9 kernel; fixed up Lilo; and rebooted. The system came right up, but when I did startx, X failed to start. I tried running xf86config myself, but that was no better. So I mounted my Gentoo system and copied over my trusty XF86Config-4 from Gentoo. viola, it works! startx brings you to a nifty little menu (gdm?) where you choose IceWm or XFCE, and both of these work. Of course, my sound card and NIC were not working, becuase I didn't copy over the kernel modules. That was all for one night. Tonight I downloaded the 2.4.5 kernel source (don't you just love cable!) and my .config file from 2.4.4-ac9 and did a standard kernel compile on vectorlinux. It seemed to run substantially faster than on any other distro I've used. After that I switched back to Gentoo to update Lilo, and rebooted the new kernel. Success. My NIC came right up, and a ping of my lan master worked. Modprode esssolo1 fired up my sound card. The proof of the pudding that this was a really good distro - they even included a fairly current version of sylpheed!!! A little bit of configuring sylpheed, and here I am on the air again. The version of Nutscrape (???) they supply works, too. The only thing missing in the way of software I actually use is cdrecord, and that should be simple to add. Of course, I'm sure I'll put Opera on here, too. The only office product they offer is Pathetic Writer, and that is truly pathetic (I've seen it before). Not bad for about 6 hours work. I should have lots of fun with this until Gentoo releases a 586 version. -- Collins Richey Denver area vectorlinux 2.0 - 2.4.5 kernel - XFree86-4.1 _______________________________________________ http://linux.nf -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Archives, Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, Etc ->http://linux.nf/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
