Vector Linux 5.1 - An ideal distro for older hardware

For some time the Sony Vaio PGP-737 I paid such a lot for in 1998 has been all but unusable with my normal distro Mandriva Linux. Despite using the lightweight IceWM Window Manager it would spend most of its time thrashing about swapping data to and from hard disc, and there would be interminable waits while it did anything. Also the distro occupied almost the entire 2GB hard drive leaving almost nothing for my data. I therefore set out to find a replacement and narrowed my search down to Vector Linux or Puppy Linux (which will be the subject of another review).

My laptop has a 233MHz Pentium I and 96M of RAM so any new distro had to work with quite limited resources. Vector Linux is claimed to be among the best performing distros on old hardware.

Installation of Vector Linux was not flawless. Other distros I have tried have done a better job at getting themselves working on this hardware, but once installed Vector was a pleasure to use and considerably faster than the Mandriva 2006 I had installed previously. Solutions were found for almost every problem I encountered, and the Vector Linux on line forums were very informative and helpful. I like Vector Linux so much that I intend to use it on my laptop, and shall give it a try on my daughters 800MHz Via C3 computer too. Here is my experience :-

Installation

Vector has a text based installer. It works.
It detected my hardware OK, pcmcia, wireless card, video, mouse, CD. It installed in about 800MB of space and came as standard with fluxbox, IceWM and XFCE4 window managers. There is a SOHO version of Vector Linux 5.1 which includes KDE, but I would not even attempt to run KDE on this old junk.

The Vector Linux installer installed both 2.6.12 and 2.4.29 kernels for me. I would later come to thank the installer for this since in operation the 2.6 kernel proved not to be too good on this hardware and the 2.4 kernel proved to be better.

Vector is a Slackware based distro. I was initially cautious of that since Slack has a reputation for being difficult to manage, but the 'slapt-get' package management system made it fairly painless to install additional packages although I had trouble with the 'Gslapt' graphical package management system (of which more later). The text based slapt-get was no trouble to me, but Linux newbies might be more challenged by it.

Whats good, and whats not

On initial boot Vector presents a truly beautiful login screen complete with water ripple effects when the mouse is moved and half a dozen mini penguins walking and flying about the screen. The user can pick the Window Manager to use. I chose XFCE4 since I was familiar with it. XFCE is much prettier than other low power Window Managers such as IceWM, and is not noticeably slower. The XFCE4 desktop is also beautiful with a very nice theme. It has the ROX filer pinboard overlaid on the desktop which allows icons to be placed on the desktop. Rox is the default file manager. I have loved Rox for some time. It is very fast, and so easy to use. In Vector Linux CDs and floppies have to be manually mounted before they can be used. A quick click in Rox will mount/unmount CDs and floppies.

Vector comes with a good basic set of applications for a low end machine. It has xmms media player, Rox file manager, gqview image viewer, Abiword word processor, Sylpheed Claws mail client, Xine video player, various utilities, and the Firefox browser. I replaced Xine with GXine which uses the same Xine engine, but manages to run significantly faster than Xine itself. Vector's version of GXine is an ancient 0.3.3, but I found a Slackware package for version 0.4.8.

Also included is the Dillo browser which is easily the fastest non text browser around. But Dillo will not work on many sites on the Internet, so a more complete browser is also required. Firefox is still a bit too slow on this machine so I installed Opera 8.5 from the Opera download site (Install the 'qt' package first since Opera needs it). Opera is not in a standard Slackware package so I had to unpack it and execute the Opera install script, not difficult, but also not newbie friendly either. Opera is really fast on older computers, I cannot recommend it enough, and the built in mail client to Opera is faster than Sylpheed Claws, so I use Opera for both browsing and email on this computer. But I am getting ahead of myself. Before I can download anything I have to get the internet working.

Networking

Vector has an admin GUI called VASM System Configurator which allows you to perform basic setup. VASM is nowhere as sohisticated as the Mandriva tools I am used to, but they basically worked, except I had difficulty setting up my 802.11b wireless PCMCIA card. Vector had loaded the corect orinoco driver no problem and recognised the card, but I had difficulty getting the wireless parameters to stick using the GUI and eventually had to edit the /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts file by hand. Once the wireless parameters were set I could use the network GUI to set the network parameters to use DHCP which worked OK. Experienced Linux users would have no problem, but newbies might find it a bit tricky. I assume Vector will work out of the box with other hardware configurations.

I later worked out that the reason Vector had trouble configuring my wireless card was because it relied on the iwlist command to find available local networks. My old Buffalo Orinoco compatible wireless card does not support the iwlist command.

To get around the problem I devised a patch for the file /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless from line 57


for test_ESSID in $ESSID_list; do
        if [ -f "$WirelessDir/$test_ESSID.essid.conf" ]; then
                echo "Connect: $test_ESSID"
                . /etc/wireless/$test_ESSID.essid.conf
                break
        fi
done
#Patch to connect to first wireless network found if iwlist command does
#not work
echo "Connecting to first network found"
if [ -z $ESSID_list ] ; then
    . $(ls $WirelessDir/*.essid.conf | grep -m 1 essid.conf)
fi
# End patch
}

With this patch the wireless card will look for a wireless configuration file set up by the Vector Linux wireless configurator and will try to connect to that network.

Sound

I had big problems with sound. My sound chip is really old and useless, but under Mandriva it "just worked" with Alsa using the snd-sb8 driver and the 2.6.12 kernel. Vector did not auto detect the sound chip so I configured /etc/modprobe.conf by running 'alsaconfig'. Unfortunately alsaconfig failed to detect the corect options for the chip so I had to edit modprobe.conf by hand using the settings Mandriva had detected. However in Vector with the 2.6 kernel alsa was unreliable, sometimes it worked on boot, other times it did not. When sound did work xmms did not work with the 'default' alsa device and had to be told to use the hw:0,0 device. Mplayer and Xine did not work at all with Alsa regardless of the device, but did work in OSS emulation mode.

I then tried the 2.4.29 kernel, but then sound did not work at all until I read a post on the friendly Vector forum saying to run the snddevices script that can be found by downloading and unpacking the alsa-driver package fron the www.alsa-project.org site. This script creates nodes in /dev for sound. After running this script Alsa sound worked perfectly in the 2.4 kernel including mplayer and xine. Vector really should include this script in the distro.

Kernel

Apart from sound the 2.6 kernel gave me other problems. My computer would not shut down. Switching to the 2.4 kernel fixed the issue. Don't think that the 2.6 kernel is 'better' because it is newer. The 2.4 kernel is just fine on older hardware.

NFS

I store my music collection on an NFS server so I need nfs to work for me. Vector loads the nfs module as standard, but does not include an nfs-utils package so it is impossible to mount an nfs share. I had to download and install a slackware package which worked just fine. It is possible to use Slackware packages on vector if there is not a suitable Vector package.

I still had an issue with NFS mounts defined in my /etc/fstab file not automatically mounting on boot. I tracked this down to a bug in Vector Linux in the file /etc/rc.d/rc.M. The patch to fix it is shown here from line 116


NFSTAB=`grep -E "^[^#].*[[:space:]].*[[:space:]](nfs|smbfs|ncpfs)[[:space:]]" /etc/fstab`
if [ "$NFSTAB" ]; then
  echocl "Mounting network file system ..." cyan
  if echo $NFSTAB | grep -qw nfs; then
    # Start the RPC portmapper if we find NFS volumes defined in /etc/fstab.
    if ! /usr/sbin/rpcinfo -p 1> /dev/null 2> /dev/null ; then
      if [ -x /sbin/rpc.portmap ]; then
        echonl "Starting RPC portmapper ..."
        /sbin/rpc.portmap > /dev/null 2&>1
        evaluate_retvall
      fi
    fi
    echonl "Mounting remote (NFS) file systems ..."
#Patch to fix automounting of NFS shares
#    /sbin/mount -a -t nfs  > /dev/null 2&>1
    /sbin/mount -a -t nfs > /dev/null
#End Patch
    evaluate_retvall
  fi

Samba

I never did succeed in mounting Samba shares. First I installed the samba package. Vector does not have a separate samba-client package like other distros, so I had to install the whole of samba which is huge just to allow mounting samba shares. Secondly the XFSamba application in XFCE could not browse the network, nor could LinNeighborhood. I tracked the problem to the Vector firewall which disables samba broadcasts onto the local network. Other distro's firewalls stop traffic getting into your computer. Vector's firewall also stops traffic getting out! On disabling the firewall I could browse but not mount shares. XFSamba said I did not "have an smbfs enabled kernel."

After some thought I realised that I had to install the module for smbfs with the command
modprobe smbfs in a root terminal
I then expected XFSamba to mount the shares, but no. It still said my kernel was not smbfs enabled. At that point I gave up. I'll just use gFTP with ssh protocol to transfer files to/from my other computers. I do not have any Windows computers, so there is no reason I have to use Samba.

Note: Its a pity that XFCE's Xffm file manager does not support the fish:// protocol like KDE's Konqueror does. It makes file transfers between Linux computers a breeze. gFTP is a usable alternative, but konqueror does it better. Unfortunately this computer is not fit to run konqueror.

Package Management

Vectors Gslapt package management GUI refused to run no matter how I tried it when logged in as a user. I had to log in as root (starting it from a root terminal when logged in as a user did not work either). From the forums I learned this is a known issue and had to install the gksu package using slapt-get and then edit the XFCE menus to call gslapt with the command
gksu -u root /usr/sbin/gslapt

Packages are sourced from online repositories defined in /etc/slapt-get/slapt-getrc There is only one source predefined for the vector repository. If one is added for Slackware then Slack packages can be installed easily. As noted earlier the Slack package nfs-utils is essential to get NFS working.

Conclusion

If I were to be asked if Vector Linux was a good distro for a new Linux user to start with I would have to say "No it isn't". There are simply too many tweaks to be made to make it usable. But if I were to be asked is Vector Linux a good distro for experienced Linux users to use on older hardware, then I would say "Yes it is". When properly configured Vector is fast and pleasurable to use.

However I cannot think of another distro that is easier to set up on old hardware and performs as well as Vector. While Mandriva did do a better job of installing on this hardware, its performance after installation was not good enough. I can only suggest that newbies try Linux out on relatively recent hardware before declaiming in forums that "linux sucks" because it did not work on their old junk.

For newbies with relatively new hardware and at least 256MB of RAM I would say use PCLOS. PCLOS does a very good job of installing on all sorts of hardware, and because it can run as a 'LiveCD" you can find out very quickly if it will work on your hardware. For a full featured operating system for both desktop and server I would recommend Mandriva.

For my own laptop I am torn between Vector and Puppy Linux. Puppy is clearly faster, and in some respects it does things better than Vector, but Vector is the clear winner when it comes to polish and breadth of applications. That XFCE desktop is really nice. Getting Puppy working was even harder than Vector, but once it was working I found it a great little Operating System. For the moment I shall boot both, but I suspect I will end up choosing Vector.

Wednesday 9th November 2005