Back to Vec

  If you've followed this blog, or you know me, you know I've been a
   vectorlinux user and collaborator for a few years.  Lately, I didn't
   use it and favoured Ubuntu and Arch. The change was done because I
   needed packages that weren't in the official vl repos, and were not
   trivial to build. And was lazy.

   After 1 year (more or less) I found another opportunity for vl, and
   I have to say I'm happy to have tried it.

Installing vectorlinux

   I'm using a Lenovo thinkpad X61, and it doesn't have CD, so the way
   to get a linux running there is booting through an usb drive.
  
   I used unetbootin + VL light 7.0, and found the first
   issue. There's some missmatch between unetbootin versions and vl
   image format, and my unetbootin left the boot image in
   isolinux/kernel/sata instead of /syslinux/kernel/sata . Just
   copying the directory to the other place solved the booting issue.

Booting

   As usual, everything worked as expected, no glitches, and all
   configs did their job.

Packages

   After installing a linux distro, first thing to do is installing
   the 'must have' apps.
  
   - edit /etc/slapt-get/slapt-getrc and enable a few more repos
   - slapt-get --update
   - slapt-get -i ratpoison

   Nice we have 1.4.5 there :). Then, let's go for emacs. OOps,
   there's just emacs 23.X in the repo.

   As a side note, I have to say that besides not having used vl for a
   year, I kept an eye on the irc channel, and I've kept in touch (and
   sometimes giving a hand or opinion in vl projects) with rbistolfi 
   (one of the devs).

   Long story short. After pinging rbistolfi and asking for emacs
   24.1, I had a working package in 30 minutes. And the effort is not
   lost, but all the work is prepared to be pushed to the repos.
  
   While doing my usual instalations, I found some missing packages in
   the repo, so asked for a way to contribute back. You know, I wrote
   the package that vl still uses to build packages, but now I see the
   workflow is much more streamlined. See it in the NEXT POST (NIY).

Early opinion

The first impression is that the whole system is faster than ubuntu. As always, the package selection is really nice, and not having to install 5 related  -dev packages but just one when I need a feature is really confortable.

I already comited a couple of packages to the repo, and found some bug in sbbuilder that I'll try to tackle this weekend.

Vectorlinux, I'm back!