After a few days of downloading the VLOS 1.2 ppc iso via bittorrent I tried the installation, because the idea of having a Gentoo based distribution with a graphical installer sounds good to me.

My B&W G3 with 400 Mhz is already running Mac OS X, Gentoo and Debian and I have a little space on my hard drive to give another distribution a try.

Well, my VLOS installation failed as the X-server should be launched to start the graphical installer. Anyone who ever tried Yellow Dog Linux knows the Anaconda installer which is also used by VLOS. It never failed with Yellow Dog on my machine with the Ati 7000 and an ordinary CRT monitor.

Without this option of a graphical install this distro has become uninteresting for me - I can just as well stick to Gentoo, where I know everything is working.

A few days before ralf posted his experiences of a successful VLOS installation on his iMac G3 at our german site :VLOS 1.2 PowerPC - Kurztest.

Here's what he's got to say:

Installation CD

The installation CD can be obtained via bittorrent. But be patient - it takes a while because the number of peers is limited concerning the PPC version. After two days I was able to burn the iso CD.

Booting went fine - boot, yaboot, Kernel and off it goes.

You are welcomed by graphical screen which looks quite pleasant and promising.

The screenshots I took are made with a camera and are not real snapshots so you have to excuse the quality of some pictures.

Let's just rush past the language settings and keyboard layout.

Of course you can let VLOS do the partitioning for you, but you would miss Disk Druid. Choose the partition, set parameters like the mount point, the file system - write to disk and finished. Perfect.

It's better and more logical than Windows. Even Mac OS X isn't so straight forward cramped attempt to be user friendly - only possible by offering no options at all. The better way is shown up by Disk Druid.

After the partitioning part with Disk Druid the network is configured - also a very straight forward process.

Now you go on selecting the time zone and set up an account for a user as well as the root account.

At the end the packages for installation are selected. What you see are all packages. Not enough? There will be more later on. Then the installation begins. Well, it doesn't take 8 seconds nor 8 minutes - it's an hour. Not so fast as Ubuntu but compared to a normal Gentoo installation very fast. After a while the installer informs you that the installation is finished.

Possibly you won't be able to get to the nice desktop held in the nice PPCNUX colors.

One thing is that VLOS recognizes other partitions and OS'es but just expects to be the default OS. A user orientated configuration would be nicer.

The Xserver (Xorg) dies on the iMac screen just like on any other installation but it seems that the Xerver finds a working configuration.
Hoping to work with millions of colors an 24/32 bit it was soon clear that I would get disappointed - just a black screen. Trying to reach the console failed also. After a reboot I recognized that the consoles didn't work. The next shock - no vi editor available. How should I tweak my configuration files without an editor? Does nano count as a real editor?

The Gnome desktop is a familiar thing but the panel crashes frequently. Trying to start the panel again results in two panels wanting to start, what is quite impossible. Great!

Now let's just do a emerge vim. There is something called "yukiyu" that remembers me of synaptic. So I update the package information and search for "vim". Ah, there it is. It depends on another package. Now I press the "emerge" button (is it meant for the chosen package or for another one?) and a window opens with endless lines scrolling past my eye. Looks like somethings being compiled. Vim is installed, but nothing happens. The dependencies? Meanwhile the buginess (panel) is annoying which makes me reboot again. Starting yukiyu gets me stuck in the package update. Again yukiyu and vim is still there but missing dependencies.Hmmm... Frank told me about porthole, the grapical frontend of emerge. So I search for porthole, fetch it - and, hey, it works. I start porthole ... and ... surprise ... it looks like yukiyu!

Ok, back to yukiyu again, then. There are still some programs that need to be fetched. Gnumeric, ryhthembox, openoffice, Mozilla Firefox 1.0.6 and so on.
One programm installs without dependencies again. Suddenly nothing goes in yukiyu. Quit, restart and all those hanging programs are really tough.

Reboot. Start yukiyu and it quits again while reading packages. Still no vim. Try to copy mp3's from the flash card. Connect the USB flash reader, insert the SD card, everything is recognized and appears on the desktop. Start to copy and ... hangs again. The reader doesn't respond and the cards vanish from the desktop.

Maybe I'm spoilt through the usage of package mangement systems like dpkg, apt, dselect and synaptic that my expectations that a simple "emerge vim" would also deal with the dependencies are pure luxury. Could be that I don't understand the basics of emerge. It was worth a try because the partition was empty an VLOS just out. But being used to a working Linux and the force of habit where stronger to switch back to Ubuntu. Quicker than VLOS Ubuntu rewarded me with a working system. Even though the experienced problems should be seen mainly in yukiyu and Gnome.

One thing should be mentioned - the VLOS Installer is cool. Respect. Together with Ubuntu Linux can compete very well with Microsoft Windows when it comes to user friendliness and convenience of installation.

Copyright (2005) by Ralf Saalmüller, Amonshöhe 26, 97437 Hassfurt, Germany

VLOS is a GPL Linux of Vidalinux.com

The review is also part of the GPL.