Vector Linux and Ark Linux: Two Distributions to Watch

Michael J. Jordan, Linux Online Staff

March 31, 2005

In this, our final installment in our series of up and coming Linux distributions, we look at two distributions that aren't widely talked about, but probably should be. They are Vector Linux and Ark Linux. Vector is an extremely attractive and very user-friendly Linux distribution. Ark Linux, though attractive, has some bugs to work out. Despite some of the pain I had to go through to get Ark Linux running, the installation, with all its present flaws, shows great potential. First, let's have a look at Vector Linux.

Vector Linux

Vector Linux is a light-weight distribution aimed at desktop users and based on the venerable Slackware. I downloaded the 5.0 SOHO version from one of the mirrors listed on their downloads page . When you install Vector, don't be surprised at first to see a text mode installer. Since you're probably only going to see the installer once, the developers (known as 'Vectelopers' by the way) must have decided to put their efforts into making the installation procedure easier rather than prettier.

Pre-install and Partitioning

First, it will ask you to choose your keymap. For those using a layout other an the US one, you will be able to test if the keys are working. I use the Spanish layout. Curiously, my 'nye' (ñ) didn't work during the test. It did work later.

You will now be presented with three menu choices. First, is 'Start', which is rather self explanatory. This starts the install. The second is 'LILO'. 'LILO' is the 'Linux Loader'. This is a small program that normally resides on the Master Boot Record of your hard drive. At boot time, it gives you the option to load the operating system of your choice. You won't be needing this option unless you wish to repair a failed installation. The third option is 'Exit', which is also pretty self-explanatory. If you choose 'Start', it will look for the installation CD and ask you if it's the right one. Unless you accidentally put the CD of the Greatest Hits of Engelbert Humperdinck in the drive, choose 'yes'. Just a little note before you actually choose 'yes'. The Vectelopers recommend at least a Pentium III to get the best results from Vector. Not to contradict them (I mean, after all, they're the ones who made it) but I'm getting just fine results on my 400 Mhz AMD K6-2, which is roughly equivalent to a Pentium II.

After choosing 'Start', you'll be given three more menu choices. These are 'Resize', 'FDisk' and 'Install'. The 'Resize' option is for taking existing hard drive partitions and reducing them to make room for Linux. If I had installed Windows on this machine too, I would have liked to try this out. But I am not a user of Microsoft's products, so I'll have to admit to ignorance on this option. The third option, 'Install', will march you right into the installation. Those who have been following this series can attest to the fact that I'm a fan of having two main hard drive partitions plus a swap partition, so I chose 'FDisk', which I assumed meant manual partition. I think it would be better to use the word 'Partition' instead of 'FDisk'. FDisk is a program, also found on MS-DOS, to do the actual partitioning. But to a lot of people this is meaningless.

Choosing 'FDisk' will fire up the program 'CFDisk', a venerable (and confusing) partitioning tool for Linux. Luckily, the Vectelopers have written a concise how-to on partitioning which they show you at this point. CFdisk has been around as long as I have been using Linux and has been scaring Linux novices for more than a decade, but it isn't really that bad. In a nutshell, the idea is to leave your hard disk empty by deleting any existing partitions. Then, according to my favorite partitioning scheme, we create one called '/' - known as the root partition, one called /home, where we'll keep our personal files and finally, a swap partition which will help with memory usage. After you have created these partitions, you need to tell the program which type you want them to be. This is done by using the tab button and choosing, appropriately enough, the [Type] option. For / (root) and /home, choose the number 83, for the standard Linux filesystem. For the last one you will need to choose 'swap', which is number 82. Go back and highlight the first partition - / (root) and choose [Bootable]. Write the partitioning tables to the disk (choose [Write]) and your computer will now reboot.

After rebooting, you'll be back at the 'Resize', 'FDisk' and 'Install' menu again. This time, choose 'Install'. You'll now be presented with a menu with multiple choices. The best thing to do is to go through them in order. The first menu choice is 'Check Files'. It will show a list of three bzipped tarballs, veclinux, openoffice and xampp. At this point in the install, I didn't know what these were for, since I had never used Vector Linux before. I was somewhat curious as to what these tarballs were. I found out later that the install system for Vector is based on a the concept of installing programs in packages known as 'Bulks'. These are the three main 'Bulks' for Vector Linux. If you choose these, it will go through the process of checking to see if these 'Bulks' are OK - that they don't contain any errors. This is a good thing, I would say. After this, the program goes automatically to the selection of partitions for their different roles. By default, it goes first to /home. In what might be a bit off-putting for novice, you have to remember what part of the hard disk you assigned for /home. If you're like me, it should be the second partition you created. Choose this. Starting with home is actually a good idea, because you may be changing from another distribution and you can save your user files from the old one. And if that's the case, you are now presented with multiple choices on what to do with this partition. You can choose 'KEEP' here. To show that the Vectelopers have a sense of humor, you're given several opportunities to choose 'KEEP'. If you're installing from scratch, you can choose among the the traditional Linux filesystem 'ext2' or the newer journaling file systems 'ext3' or 'ReiserFS'. The journaling systems are better if your machine should go down unexpectedly, so I chose 'ext3' (though Reiser is equally suitable). Now choose the 'swap' area and finally use the first partition as the / (root) partition. I also formatted this as 'ext3'.

The next part is the selection of the aforementioned 'bulks'. There are three main categories of packages. Bulk 1 is the base system, Bulk 2 contains the OpenOffice.org suite and Bulk3 contains web server applications (Apache web server, MySQL database, PHP web scripting language and the ProFTP server). If you don't plan on using this machine to serve web pages then don't choose the last one. If you think you might like to and have the extra space, then feel free to select this bulk. You can also pick and choose individual packages in the bulks. For example, Vector comes with two video players, Mplayer and Xine. I didn't think that I needed two of them so I took 'Mplayer' off the list of packages to install (not due to any preference, just because it came after Xine in the list). Other interesting packages that are worthy of note are:

• Blender, a 3D modeling application
• Firefox browser
• GIMP, the popular image manipulation program
• QCad, a free CAM/CAD program
• Scribus, a desktop publishing suite
• KMyMoney and GNUCash - two personal finance managers
• K3b, the popular CD/DVD burning tool.

Once you've made your choices, you come to the final, rather humorous install menu. 'Install' encourages you to "Go for it". 'Back' is for those who'd like to go back and take a second look at what packages they're going to install. Finally, 'Abort' are for those "scared my system will be turned into toast". I can assure you that your system will be perfectly fine, baring any unforeseen acts of nature, like a thunderstorm during the install. So you can safely choose 'Install' and go for it. If you want to stick around for this (the developers flash a message that tells you that you can leave if you want), you can read other messages that flash across the screen.

Configuration Options

Once the bulks have been installed, it's time to install LILO. the Linux loader. The best bet, as is pointed out, is to install into the Master Boot Record. Then you need to choose the operating system to boot. Since I only have this on on the system, all the options were the same. I just chose 'OK'.

Now, you'll see another option: 'Frame Buffer Console'. This will give you a snappy GUI to choose your operating system at boot time. It's best to choose 'standard' as they point out. All hardware will support that option. The next setup option is for passing special parameters to the Linux kernel at boot time. This is probably something that you won't need, particularly with the 2.6 kernel. IDE CD burners, for example, used to need SCSI emulation with older kernels and options needed to be set for this at boot time. Other funky hardware still may need it, but you can most likely ignore this. After you get these two LILO related setup options out of the way, LILO will be installed.

Next we pass to the main setup options. Some of these are optional and you can uncheck them but I kept each one checked. They are:

• Keyboard model and layout:
  

  I need a Spanish layout. For the variant, I chose 'basic'

• Timezone
  

  I chose local time and my location

• Mouse setup
  

  I chose my type of mouse

• Network card (found it ok)
• Network hostname
  

  Here you need to enter the name of the computer and domain if it applies. You should seek help from the network administrator if you don't know this information.

• Network method
  

  Choose from: DHCP, STATIC, PROBE or NONE (if you're not connected). Again. you might need help. I have a home network that connects to the outside through an ADSL router. My method is 'STATIC'. I needed to assign an IP address to the machine and tell it my router's IP address for the gateway.

• Alsa configuration (for sound)
• X Window configuration
  

  I chose 'Auto'. The Vectelopers will ask for forgiveness if they can't find your graphics card. Will also ask for your preferred screen resolution and color depth.

It will now ask you the method you want for your boot process. You have four choices. One is 'Text mode desktop', which I didn't even know existed. Sounds like the old MS-DOS days. The next is 'Text mode server' - if you're using this primarily as a web server and not a desktop. The two remaining are 'GUI mode desktop' and 'GUI mode server'. I chose the third, since is that's what I plan on using the machine for.

You will now see some choices for 'Hardware Init Configuration'. These are things that you may need at setup time. If you feel you won't need it, then don't select it.

Next we move on to user configuration settings. Here, the instructions are fairly straightforward and standard for most Linux distributions. You need to change the root password and then add a normal user. I found the user account setup a bit more involved that it needs to be. All users on the system are assigned a user ID number (known as UID). This is normally assigned automatically. Picking the UID manually is an unnecessary step, I think. Once you've created the user and chosen your password, the configuration process is complete. You can now remove the CD and reboot.

Upon reboot, you'll be greeted with an attractive splash screen. You can choose between booting into the standard GUI or text mode The GUI in question is KDE.

KDE is an attractive and easy to use desktop that comes will all kinds of programs. KDE based distributions tend to offer more variety to the user.

Vector comes with the Firefox browser and Flash enabled. If you want other plugins, like Real Player or others, you'll have to download and install them on your own. So again, like many Linux distributions, you do not get the 100% internet experience out of the box. But with so many proprietary multimedia formats out there, it isn't surprising that Linux developers haven't overcome this hurdle.

Since we're on the subject of multimedia, sound worked out of the box. I copied a few MP3s and Oggs to this machine and played them. There was a slight glitch at first. By default, Vector opens these files with an application called Amarok. Amarok didn't seem to want to play them and then crashed. Luckily, Vector comes with XMMS which will play Oggs and MP3s just fine.

To install new programs, Vector comes with a program called VLAPT. This program is actually a front end to SLAPT-GET, the package management tool for Slackware-based distributions like Vector Linux. I clicked on the VLAPT icon on the desktop and after entering the root password, you're given the choice of updating, installing and removing via a comfortable and intuitive user interface. To try it out, I clicked on 'install' and chose the light-weight web browser Dillo. After clicking on a confirm dialog box, Dillo was quickly installed. You can do the same with any other application in the list.

On an interesting security note, Vector comes with a tool called Guarddog to configure a firewall. Setting up a secure firewall is a bit beyond the scope of this review, but if you try out Vector I encourage you to check this application out. Just select the tab 'Protocol' and click on the protocols that you want to be allowed access to. You really don't have to be a network administrator to understand it because the protocols are all explicitly labeled (like AOL, Yahoo messenger, Bittorent and the like).

To sum up, Vector, though it doesn't have the name recognition of distributions like Red Hat or SuSE, has its advantages over them. It's lightweight, fairly easy to install and will give you a attractive and user friendly system. Vector Linux is definitely worth a try.

Epilogue: Ark Linux

Michael J. Jordan is the webmaster of Linux Online. He can be reached at Michael.Jordan**AT**Linux.org