Quick Rundown of My Experience with Yoper
January 23, 2003
Benjamin Vander Jagt
benvanderjagt@adelphia.net
ICQ: 6730681
AIM: benvanderjagt

(I have been using Red Hat 8.0 Psyche (a.k.a Psycho, Psyke) the most extensively.  I've also used Mandrake 9, SuSE 8.1, and FreeBSD 5.0DP2.  I'm currently using Red Hat 8.0, so my experience with Yoper is comparitave to it.)

System installed onto:
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 1700+
Mommyboard: Jetway 867
RAM: 512MB PC133
Sound Card: Sound Blaster Live Value
Network Card: D-Link PCI  network card
Video Card: ATI All-In-Wonder 128 with 16MB RAM
CD-ROM: Verbatim 48x12x50x CD-RW
Mouse: 3-button Genica PS/2
Hard Drive: 80GB 7200RPM Western Digital
Cable internet connection

My first installation failed, because I tried to use a pair of 2GB drives I had laying around.  I assumed I could put the root directory on one drive and put the swap on the other, but unfortunately Yoper only sees the first drive.  The installer didn't impress me as being able to retain any of the data from my current installation, so I postphoned installation.

Installation was a bit weird.  I'm usually not one to complain about an installer being slow or confusing.  This was the most confusing, though.  After booting from the second CD, you are given a single user prompt at which you type "yoper" and press enter.  It then starts the installer.  During the installer, various things are a little confusing, such as the dialog boxes that ask you which partition you want to use as a swap.  There's no mouse to click the checkbox, and pressing tab and arrow keys will just shuffle between "Ok" and "Cancel".  You have to press space to toggle a checkbox.  The CFDISK program requires some old fashioned keyboard trickery, which I don't mind.  Choosing partitions and defining their paths, which I was used to in every other distribution, didn't seem to exist.  Documentation was non-existant.  You really have to know what kinds of partitions you need.  To the best of my understanding, you can only have a primary partition and a swap partition for your Yoper installation.  I personally prefer to define at least a separate /home partition so that I can do anything I wish with the rest of the system and not lose any of my data.

After running the fdisk stuff, it gave me a message saying that Yoper was installing and that it would take from 5 to 20 minutes.  It took around 5 minutes.

LILO was the only boot manager available.  LILO is good and serves it's purpose faithfully, but GRUB has some pretty useful features, such as a bootloader password.  GRUB seems to be advancing more than LILO.

I didn't get any chance to tell LILO that I had a Windows partition on the drive, so if I want to get into Windows, I need to either boot from a Windows disk or CD and run "fdisk /mbr" to kill the bootloader or edit the LILO configuration.  (Let's assume for a moment that I don't know everything about LILO!)

After it finished installing stuff, it rebooted, and I got a chance to see the LILO boot manager screen.  The boot manager was not very descriptive.  It just said YOS in the corner and had a clock countdown to 0:00 when it booted to Yoper.  It's only moderately obvious what that screen means.  All it takes is one stray keypress and that screen will stay there until someone either presses enter or presses the reset button.

Yoper booted very quickly!  Slow boots have plagued Linux and made it undesirable for desktop systems.  Linux generally starts programs more slowly than Windows and runs them more quickly.  Yoper seems to start programs and run them about the same as other distributions.  I didn't do any sort of extensive testing on this, though.  Boot was really quick, though!

Yoper uses KDE (only) for it's desktop manager.  Some of the more common multimedia programs came pre-installed.  OpenGL support didn't seem to exist for my ATI Rage128.  This makes the first new Linux distribution that I've tried that did not support this card.  I was a little intrigued by a couple of the multimedia programs.  I wanted to test whether they could read .rm files.  They couldn't.

You can't choose packages at startup.  This makes my first OS of any kind in a long time that didn't let you choose what you wanted to install.

Nothing works right, though.  During my first boot, I opened up a multimedia program (I think it was Naotun), and I lost control.  I should explain.  The mouse pointer turned into the hand with a finger (might as well have been the middle finger), and I could easily move the mouse.  There was no disk activity.  The mouse didn't have control over anything.  Ctrl-Alt-F2 and Ctrl-Alt-Backspace didn't do anything.  I couldn't try a telnet (because the network card never worked), but I would guess that it would have access, since the system didn't actually freeze.  I had to press reset.

This type of freeze really worries me.  It denotes a partial loss of responsiveness.  I now suspect the stability of Yoper is not perfect.

I wanted to try out Timidity with a couple MIDIs, but it seems that Timidity (and KMidi) only have two people in their orchestra awake: a pianist and a guitar player.  Also, the sound kept fading in and out.  There was no MIDI support for my Sound Blaster Live.  I'm a little surprised by that but not dismayed, since the MIDI on this card isn't great.  (I'm still holding out hope for MIDI support for my Turtle Beach Tropez+...maybe someday.)

I tried out a couple of the games and "toys".  I would have recommended that the Yoper packagers not include the games, since they would give people a misconception that Linux is not a gaming OS.  If any game were installed, I would recommend Tux Racer or maybe the Quake 3 demo, if the licensing allows it.

There was no support for my video input (ATI All-In-Wonder 128).  This was no surprise, since no Linux distribution really has any support for that card.  It's available in the form of GATOS, which has baffled me in installation.

A major problem I had was lack of support for my network card.  Yoper claimed that the card was working, but I had no Samba and no internet.  Nothing I did even tickled my network card.  For the life of me, I couldn't find anywhere to look at the network card settings, and the network settings were right.  Yoper claimed the card was an ADMtek chipped card.  It's a D-link, and I don't think it should come up as an ADMtek, but I'm not sure on the chip's compatibility and such.

SuSE installer didn't support this card either, even with the modules disks.  Mandrake never needed it for installation, but it worked fine after booting.  FreeBSD had excellent support for all the network cards I have, but I'm a little confused by everything in FreeBSD anyway!  Red Hat has always supported every piece of hardware I've thrown at it, except of course two nVidia cards I tried, but they're pretty easy to set up with the drivers from nVidia.

Another gripe I have about Yoper is that the desktop background looks really unplanned.  The text has rough edges, and the color gradation is too abrupt.

Overall, I do not recommend Yoper at this time.  If you are looking for a lightweight desktop, I recommend Mandrake.  For a lightweigt, performance oriented server, I recommend Gentoo.