I’m cursing far too many things. I really should be more positive, but this is just sad:
OK, some of you know that a couple years ago, my house was stuck by lightning (or struck close enough to cause MASSIVE problems). It went through basically every wire in the house. This was particularly bad since our network printer/fax has a phone line running to it. this meant that even though every computer was protected from the powerline as was the printer, it came in through the phone line and got into the network. Among the deceased devices were a few network cards, the printer itself, a switch, a router, a tv, two stereo systems, some phones and probably some more stuff I don’t want to remember. This time wasn’t as bad, but it still hurt the network. I’m pretty sure it got in the power lines and then got into the network through the switch in the basement. We were out another switch and lost one NIC thus far. This kinda took me offline while we tried various components of the network and rewired the important computers back in. Gah.
On a more positive note, I installed Vida Linux on a virtual computer (Version 1.2.1 R2). I installed it back in version 1 also and was not impressed. I’ve used Gentoo since 2003 on an off. I loved the operating system but had problems with it. I went 64-bit when they just added the support and had terrible application support. It also takes one hell of a long time to compile Gnome on Gentoo, so that’s a lot of downtime waiting. But I loved it every time I compiled it (I actually compiled it from a network install on my laptop once. It ran as well as I could expect, but I couldn’t get it to recognize 1024×768 and that caused major annoyances when my laptop does not stretch the video). Vida Linux is based on Gentoo, but it uses Anaconda to install Stage 3 on your machine (for those who aren’t as Linux savvy (not that I am, really), that means easy install of precompiled software. That’s a lot faster). The install was very painless. I think it took approximately a half hour to forty-five minutes for it to partition and install everything available. That’s pretty good (note, i’m using the free download version, not the "complete" pay version). I like Gnome and there was a quite pretty background to greet me when I logged in.
The default installed software is pretty decent. You have essentially everything you need right off the bat. I’m never quite satisfied with only that software (php development isn’t standard packages), so I was about to go and open a console, su, and start emerging when I remembered that there was a GUI for emerge that I haven’t used (it didn’t do much actually helpful in version 1). It’s called Yukiyu and is under the desktop->administration menu. I can honestly say I was impressed. Searching was pretty quick and you can just click to do and "advanced emerge" and set all of your build flags. I emerged Apache first. That was very nice. Next major install is PHP. Note that I do not have a MySQL database server installed. I was curious as to how it would handle my request for MySQL support in the compile. Emerge (Portage, really) handled it perfectly: it got MySQL first. PHP then compiled like a dream.
Ok, I got my software. Now do I have to fire up a text editor and do some editting followed by adding the programs to the default runlevel? It’s not that it’s hard, but it’s annoying to remember the commands. For editting configs, there isn’t a manager of sorts for them. I can’t say that’s hard to believe. All the configs are different and would be hard to centralize. It’s not hard to do the editting by hand either. If you really want, there are a lot of GUI applications to configure Apache or whatever that you could just emerge and use. But now I need autostart. Open a command prompt? No. This is another feature I was not expecting: Just go to Desktop->Administration and click Services. It reminds me of the Windows Services idea… except nothing that you don’t want and everything you do. Sure enough, all my stuff is already in the list (MySQL and Apache) and a checkbox sets them to start and starts them. If you notice, there’s a boot choice in the desktop admin menu too. Yes, that is a nice Grub editor.
So I’m quite impressed by this operating system. It seems to bring all of the benefits of Gentoo to you in a much easier package. Updating everything in the click of a button is wonderful. I’ll probably give them the $20 or $25 for the pay version to support them. This is quite impressive. I’ll probably load it on at least an older machine if not a more primary machine (my desktop or laptop).
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