Vector Linux 6 RC 4: A Brief Review

The following is a brief review of Vector Linux 6.0, Release Candidate 4

A few preliminary notes:

1. If you're not interested in computer software in general or Linux (GNU/Linux if you prefer) in particular, you should probably skip this entry.
2. If you are interested in Linux, you might want to do some more general reading about it before reading this review. Wikipedia is a pretty good start. There's a lot of information about Linux on the Web, including a variety of opinions. Sorting through all of this is a hefty chore, so try to be careful to check what is fact and what is only opinion.
3. I can't be entirely objective about this particular version (or "distribution") of Linux, since I've used it as my only desktop operating system for a few years now. Nevertheless, I will point out what weaknesses I think are there, since no software is (or can be) perfect.
4. This review is not intended to be comprehensive, since writing about such matters is not the main purpose for which I started this web log.
6. There are bound to be some problems with this release candidate of Vector Linux, since its not the final version. If you decide to install it, you might want to wait until the final version of 6.0 is out.
7. Finally, any errors of fact in this review are mine alone.

Introduction

Vector Linux was started more than ten years ago in Canada by Robert S. Lange and Darrell Stavem. It is still considered a "Canadian" distribution, but I gather that there are developers and users of Vector Linux in other countries, e.g. the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, various countries on the European continent, Argentina, and probably quite a few other places. The "Standard" version is free to download over the Internet, so I imagine that no one knows how many people are using it, not to mention where they all live. Vector Linux is based on an older Linux distribution, Slackware. Slackware is thought by many in the Linux community to be stable and probably the most Unix-like of the various distributions of Linux, though it has a reputation for being difficult to install and configure. Vector Linux not only addresses some of the weaknesses of Slackware, but also has other, possibly unique, advantages.

The Standard version is known to run well on older hardware. The one other thing for which Vector Linux is known is it's very friendly and helpful user and developer community.

I. Installation

Most Linux distributions have had graphical installers for years. Version 6.0 introduces this to Vector for the first time. I've installed previous versions using the text-based installer, which I found to be very user-friendly. Most experienced Linux users would probably not have a problem with it, though people new to Linux might. Still, the graphical installer adds a new level of ease of use. It makes Vector Linux barely more difficult to install than Windows, and possibly Mac OS X, though about that I'm not sure.

Probably the most daunting thing about installing any Linux for a new user is hard drive partitioning. The Vector Linux installer makes this easy, though for anyone attempting to install it I would recommend first doing a little research about hard disk partitioning, and also backing up any important data from your current operating system. Any time you partition a hard disk, there is the danger of data loss. If you are currently a Windows user, have your Windows CD or DVD handy, or lacking that make or have at hand a set of restoration disks.

I found Vector Linux 6.0 RC 4 (from now on, simply "Vector Linux") very easy to install. Since I already have Linux partitions on my hard drive, I was able to skip the partitioning step and use already existing partitions. The installer correctly detected and installed all of my hardware, including my onboard ethernet, my video card, hard drives, and so on, with one exception, my printer. I'll write a brief note about that later. I had to answer the usual questions such as language, preferred keyboard layout, time zone, root (or "administrator") password, user accounts, monitor resolution, type of mouse, and so on. At some point I was given the choice of installing (or not) optional software. Since I had a large partition available (25 gigabytes), I chose to install everything. Then the installer proceeded to do its thing, while I played a game of xgalaga (included with the installer). After that was finished, I remember rebooting, making a few configuration choices, and then logging into my new Vector Linux installation.

2. Desktop

The Standard version of Vector Linux uses the Xfce Desktop Environment as default, with a few alteratives available at login time. I honestly don't remember what they are. Xfce does not have all of the features of KDE or GNOME, but it does have quite a few, is easy to configure with graphical tools, and requires much less in the way of system resources than KDE or GNOME. Vector Linux has also customized Xfce so that it is much nicer to look at than in its default state. In addition to that, the default theme ("gotchione") is very slick looking. The default wallpaper is also very impressive, though of course I immediately changed it to something else of my own preference.

Xfce (formerly XFCE) comes with a few useful features of its own. Among them are an easy to use settings manager, helpful for many things, Thunar (an excellent file manager), Terminal (a snappy-looking terminal emulator), Mousepad (a text editor), a full-featured panel (sometimes called a "taskbar" in other desktop environments and operating systems), and probably some other things that I can't remember or don't know about.

3. Applications

Vector Linux comes with quite a few great applications just with the initial installation. Among them are various things for web browsing, graphics editing, image viewing, email, office, games, multimedia, and so on. I won't go into detail about these things here, since the applications available are more or less the same as those available for any Linux distribution. There is one thing worth noting. There is a myth that there aren't many applications available for Slackware or Slackware-based Linux distributions, and that Slackware doesn't have dependency resolution. This simply isn't true. There may be fewer applications available for Slackware than for (just an example or two) Fedora or Ubuntu, but there are very many. There are at least hundreds, possibly thousands, and they are almost all of high quality. Dependency resolution is handled by a command-line application called "slapt-get," and in Vector Linux you can install quite a bit of software with a graphical front end known as "Gslapt."

4. System Administration

Vector Linux comes with its own very useful system administration tool known as either "vasmCC" or "vasm" or sometimes "VASMCC." I think that "vasm" stands for "Vector Administrative and Services Menu" and I know that "CC" is for control center. This small but powerful and versatile tool is useful for many tasks, among them creating new user accounts, installing and configuring hardware, adding partitions or hard disks to be mounted at boot time, network configuration, and so on. At first it's a little difficult to navigate, but once you get used to it it's quite easy. To my knowledge the version of Ubuntu that's more or less equivalent to the Standard version of Vector Linux (Xubuntu) doesn't have such an administration tool.

5. Speed

I don't know how they do it, but the Vector Linux team have made a version of Linux which runs quite quickly on older hardware, and very quickly on newer hardware. For all of the features it has, Vector Linux is the fastest distribution of which I'm aware. There are customized versions that are much smaller and run faster (Damn Small Linux comes to mind), but generally they don't have the features which Vector Linux has. If you have aging but not ancient hardware, Vector Linux might be a good operating system for you.

6. Some Problems

I've had some difficulties in configuring my firewall in Vector Linux. Linux comes with a built-in firewall, and there are various graphical tools for configuring it. VasmCC has a section for firewall configuration, but I haven't found it easy to use. There are other graphical interfaces for Linux firewall configuration, but I haven't had much luck with them. From what I can tell, the default firewall settings for Vector Linux are pretty secure for most purposes without being overly so. The main problem I've had is opening the printer port on my main machine to the other ones on my network, so that I can use the main machine as a print server. I imagine I need to do some more reading about this, and learn how to do it properly. Still, it would be nice to have an easier to use graphical tool so that I wouldn't have to worry about this.

Also, for some reason I'm having trouble getting my old cranky HP Deskjet 920c working with this release. It worked fine with the previous release (and still does, since I still have it installed in another partition).

The only other problem I've had with this release candidate is that some of the software I want is not yet available in the Vector Linux 6.0 repositories. I imagine that everything or nearly everything will become available in the near future.

FINAL COMMENTS

I'm very happy with Vector Linux 6.0, even though this isn't the final version. The final version will probably come out soon, though I don't know exactly when. Installation was easy, administration is easy, there are plenty of applications to keep me happy, and I'm just now getting it tricked out the way I like it.

For more information about Linux, see the Wikipedia article by that title. For more information about Vector Linux, visit www.vectorlinux.com and forum.vectorlinux.com. For more information about Xfce, visit www.xfce.org. For more information about Free and Open Source software in general, a simple Google search should suffice. There's a lot of information out there.

A tiny little thing I want to mention last: Vector Linux, along with most Linux distributions and Linux-compatible software is both Free (in the sense of Freedom) and free (in the sense of "free of charge"). Vector Linux has both "Deluxe" and Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) versions which can be obtained for a small price. You can also make a donation to Vector Linux. At any rate, in order to get high quality software you won't have to pay the exorbitant licensing fees of proprietary software, nor will you need to break copyright law by pirating software via bittorrent or some other such method.

And very lastly, since nothing written about software is complete without at least one screenshot, here's an image of my desktop of Vector Linux 6.0 Release Candidate 4, with a few applications open.

Hans Bricker

ADDENDUM: When the final version of Vector Linux 6.0 Standard is released, I will either edit this review to fit the final release, or write an entirely new review, depending on how many changes have been made.