Re: [edlug] Looking for a new Distro

[Matthew Slane <m.slane@xxx.xxx.xxx>]

I've tried to give VL a try and have given up, the general impression 
I've got is one of sloppiness.  I can't even get the thing installed due 
to problem after problem after problem.

Firstly the bootable cd has problems with scsi, it sees my card, but 
there's no /dev/sda and no /dev/sdb and no scsi cdrom so I can't 
modprobe the module.  It's an adaptec 21960N so that is pretty 
unforgivable, but to be honest gentoo has had this problem since 1.2rc* 
days which is why I still use an old 1.0something install cd (there are 
several bug reports about this for both distros).

So after hunting through my meagre collection of floppies I found some 
without bad sectors and wrote the floppy image files from the cd to 
them.  They booted into a curses based install program and then the fun 
began. 

It asks you to select the keymap and then gives you a little text box to 
try it out in.  It was still the default US map no matter what I 
selected.  Next came the partitioning, it picked up my current linux 
partitions (all empty) without problem and asked which one I wanted to 
install into. I have different partitions for /home /usr /var /boot and 
/tmp and there is no options to let you set up a multiple partition 
system.  I looked for a fallback method, a command prompt so I could 
mkdir and mount these, but nothing.  This is meant to be a distro aimed 
at reasonably proficient users, so I find this pretty unforgivable.  I 
can fix this so I installed into my / partition and decided to go on.  
First time it searched for my install media and didn't find the cdrom, 
second time it did and installed the base layout.

After installing the base layout it gave me a pretty condescending 
message about installing the kernel and told me to press ok to move to 
an option screen to select wich kernel I wanted.  I pressed ok and 
recieved an error along the lines of "Can not find that kernel".  So I 
tried again.  Same result. 

Thinking it might be a problem finding my scsi cdrom again, I moved 
everything over to one of my FAT32 windows partitions as per 
instructions and tried again, exactly the same problem.  I did think 
about posting a message on their forums (I did search, but no result) or 
getting on IRC for some help, but the whole procedure has just left me 
with a feeling that VL just isn't worth it.  I don't usually give up 
this easily, but I just have a bad feeling about this distro.  A friend 
who got it running and ran it for a while wasn't particularly impressed, 
so maybe I'm pre-biased.

A friend has burned me the Arch Iso's and scanning through reviews and 
the forums, this looks like a distro I will like, I'll let you know how 
it goes.  I'm not going to hold Slack in a bad light because of VL, if 
Arch doesn't rock my boat, I'll give that or Peanut a go next.

If you want to check it out for yourself:

www.vectorlinux.com

Matt


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