Vine Linux 5
Requirements & Installation
Here’s what you’ll need in order to run Vine Linux:
32 Bit
CPU: Pentium 1Ghz or equivalent (i686 or higher recommended)
Memory: 256MB minimum (512MB recommended)
HD: 700MB minimum (4GB required for a full installation)
64 Bit
CPU: Intel64 or AMD64 compatible architecture
Memory: 256MB minimum (1GB recommended)
HD: 1GB minimum (4GB recommended)
Please note that when you go to install Vine Linux the first screen is in Japanese. Do not let that throw you. Simply click the green arrow to go to the next screen and you can change it to English.
Installing Vine Linux is very easy. It’s about on par with Ubuntu.
Vine Linux uses the Anaconda installer and one thing that I really liked about Vine Linux was that I had the following options to choose from when doing my install:
Everything
Desktop
Server
Base System
Custom
You really can customize how you want Vine Linux to be installed on your system and you can also customize which packages get installed as well. There’s a lot of flexibility here that isn’t necessarily found in some of the other desktop distributions that might default to a particular configuration or set of packages with no option for you to customize it.
The install took about 15 minutes or so and I had no problems with it.
Thanks to Anaconda you can choose from a range of install options.
You can stay with the defaults or choose to customize your software packages.
You can pick and choose what you want for software packages.
(7 votes, average: 2.71 out of 5)
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Desktop Linux Reviews Forum
I enjoyed this distro as well. But I fond some oddities if not irregularities:
In the 64 bit version when I tried to install Abiword, dependencies were missing, couldn’t make spell check work in OpenOffice, and installing multimedia codecs from Synaptic caused these codecs and other files to be downloaded and installed from source. Also, gnomebaker and brasero were wonky.
Hmmm…thanks for the heads up about those problems, Joe. That’s good to know.
I installed Vine 5 on my desktop, and I have to say, I was astonished. Distro is great, fast, I really like the rpm installer, you can install any rpm package via that little proggy, so, I installed OpenOffice 3.1.1 downloaded from Openoffice.org, and I also installed Firefox from mozilla.com site to avoid Japanese preference since the version that comes with Vine is a community edition made to prefer japanese sites and language. Codecs were easy peasy, self-build packages built from source, newest packages, a veru good kernel, everything works great. I think, Vine Linux 5 is somewhere between RHEL 5.3 and Fedora 11. Just were it should be. I recommend it.
I’ve had the English/native language problem with other distros developed for non-English speaking markets. But on the other hand, I’ve had the same problem with English-centric distros translated into other languages. So the problem seems to be common.
The wallpaper are cherry blossoms which are very famous in Japan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_blossom
=)
Thanks for reviewing something out of the ordinary, Jim. I always enjoy reading about different distributions. I do not try out every single one, and I am going to pass on this one, but I still value the information.
Did you learn any Japanese or any culturalisms along the way? Back in the mid nineties when I was at Digital, I worked with a Japanese employee who was on six month assignment with our Internationalization (I18N) department, where I worked at the time. I had a GREAT time with Toshiki and a number of other team members, as well as visitors from several other countries. A few years later, I ran into Toshiki again, when he was once again on a six month assignment. The years in between had caused me to lose the ability to understand his accent and I could barely understand him, but it sure was good to see him anyway. I enjoy cultural differences very much!
@ Carlo:
Carlo thanks for letting us know what it was. I’m…er…botanically challenged…heh.
@ Brian Masinick:
Brian I took one week of basic, intensive Japanese and promptly fled the class because it was way too hard. Yes, I am a wimp.