TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

MadPenguin.org is a great site. Don't get me wrong. I just think the name should be "happy, fat penguin who doesn't dislike anything dot org" instead.

Their review for this distro on that site was so glowing, so absolutely sickeningly sweet, that I was compelled to pay the $30 and wait 2 weeks for it to ship to me from Canada just to see if I could offer something a little more realistic.

The art on the discs for the Deluxe edition says that the name for this release is "Pissed Penguin". I guess I can't say I wasn't forewarned.

Install:

It's text based. Not much to say. It's not rocket science, and when you're done you *should* have a functional, graphical KDE-based desktop to play with. It had no issues with my basic hardware, until of course I decided to actually start *using* it.

On first boot, KDE showed up and all was going well until I had the audacity to try use the desktop for more than five minutes. X Windows then immediately froze, leaving me able to use my mouse, but nonetheless do nothing else short of hard rebooting. This is apparently not something MadPenguin ran into.

Second boot: although during installation I gave the correct maximum resolution for my 19" TFT monitor, I was greeted by an "out of sync range" message and a black screen. Vector did eventually show me a graphical login.

In order to make this error go away I tried to run xorgconfig again to reconfigure everything. Still I was greeted with "out of sync". The OS I paid for did not work out of the box.

The major difference between the downloadable version of VectorLinux and the "Deluxe" version is the second CD that has precompiled packages of things like RealPlayer, KDE 3.5, Freerock GNOME, and the commercial Nvidia and ATI 3D drivers. "Great", I told myself, "I can just install these like the README says by running "installpkg".

I found myself sadly mistaken. Many of the packages (mostly just the ones I wanted) errored out, or acted like they installed but went AWOL once I rebooted. Most notable among these was the Nvidia package.

To add to the fun, about every ten minutes the desktop would freeze again causing me to hard reboot. The third time this happened I was greeted with a great big gray letter L. Yes, folks, LILO would not let me boot.

I decided to give the distro a second chance on the idea that my SATA harddrive wasn't liking it. (This has been an issue with Slackware in the past.)

Install number TWO: this time I used my old 20GB IDE drive that I've reformatted more times than Ted Kennedy has mistresses. Install went off without a hitch, but as it did so on my last failed attempt, I was wary to see just how long it would take for this distribution to tank.

I didn't have to wait long. I was still greeted by the ever-present "out of sync" message upon first boot. This time around I was scrambling to get something working before X Windows froze up on me again. I lost.

I did manage to "installpkg" the Nvidia 8178 driver, but before I could edit my xorg.conf to tell KDE to use it, X froze yet again, and caused me to have to hard reboot.

This time I was ready. I booted to non-graphical (linux-tui) mode thinking surely I could just rerun xorgconfig and fix whatever Vector had screwed up. I was wrong again. Apparently "linux-tui (text mode)" is a code in the Vector world for "I'm going to completely ignore you and go into X Windows with a big red 'out of sync error' instead. Yuk yuk."

By this time I was ready to cut my losses and throw this diseased mollusk of a distro out the window, but because of you wonderful readers, I chose instead to trudge on.

I was unable to get to a text console regardless of what option I chose from LILO. The "sata-2.4.29" option gave me a root login, but the filesystem was read-only so I might as well be jerking off as trying to fix my system. At least then I'd get something out of all that work.

Install number THREE: This time I figured I'd go for broke and NOT change any of the default settings, just let them install what they thought I needed. Perhaps, I told myself, just perhaps THIS will make it work.

I also decided this time that I wouldn't let it try and pre-configure X Windows, since it seems rather inept at that. I said I wanted to run in text mode by default. Yet again, Vector thought it was smarter than me and decided to boot into graphical "out of sync" mode instead. Vector was dead in the water.

NOTE: Before I start getting emails about how my "harddrive was just bad", I immediately reformatted, repartitioned and installed (successfully) Mandriva 2006, so I'm pretty sure the issues lie with Vector.

Exasperated but not willing to give up, I popped back in my SATA harddrive and booted again. Since this drive actually gave me something other than "out of sync", I figured it was like your friend's mildly retarded but drunk sister: better than nothing.

This time thanks to my fast typing I was able to edit my xorg.conf to use the VESA driver rather than "nv", then restart X. Finally I was able to use Vector for more than a few minutes at a time.

My USB flash drive and digital camera worked as advertised. I was able to unmount the USB drive as a regular user. To my utter amazement, Vector Linux has the distinction of being the first and so far ONLY distribution that works with my scanner. Props for that, although I no longer use it in Linux.

I made the mistake of feeling comfortable with the install at this point and decided to reboot. Upon reboot I was once again greeted by the "out of sync" error screen with no way to fix it. There goes the harddrive hypothesis.

Software Selection:

The usual suspects are there. It's a KDE distro out of the box, although the KDE 3.5 install on the second disk is all foreplay; it errors out on the first line. The Nvidia install script also doesn't work. The Freerock Gnome installer works as advertised. Too bad I hate Gnome.

Enlightenment installed, and seemed to work when I launched it. It certainly wins the "freakishly weird looking, but strangely pretty" desktop award. If you like lens flares when you mouse over a menu option, Enlightenment is for you.

Most Annoying Feature:

Oh, probably the fact that I paid $30 for a distro that froze and then wouldn't boot. It could have also been the fact that I couldn't reboot the OS or I'd be greeted once again by the infamous "out of sync" error.

There's also the fact that their "deluxe extra CD" contained quite a few packages that I simply couldn't install due to errors on their part. Call me crazy, but when I pay money for something I expect the product to work better than something I could scrape off a petri dish and use to regrout my bathroom.

Who's it best for?

If you feel the pressing need to waste $30, just flush some bills down the toilet. It will be much more entertaining than buying this distribution.

Considering most folks want to be able to reboot their computers from time to time and NOT have to reinstall the operating system, I'd say take a line from the Vector Linux motto: "When choice matters..." choose something else.