Vine Linux 5
What I Liked Most
With the exception of the office suite problem (more on that below), I liked Vine Linux’s range of software. But I particularly liked the install option choices I got and the ability to configure the packages I wanted installed. More distributions should do this as sometimes we want less and sometimes we want more in terms of applications and install options. Everybody’s needs are different and your choices might be a bit different than mine so the ability to customize things is a big plus for me in terms of what Vine Linux has to offer (thanks to using the Anaconda installer).
Problems & Headaches
One thing that was odd and surprising was the lack of OpenOffice.org. At first I thought I had messed up and not picked to have the office programs installed but when I checked the install again I did, indeed, have that option picked but the only thing two things listed there were evince (document viewer) and xdvik (dvi viewer). OpenOffice was nowhere to be found and neither was any other office suite or program. Even Abiword was missing.
This is a very strange thing for a distribution that has a desktop option available when you install it. I think somebody messed up somewhere and, for whatever reason, the office suites and applications were completely omitted for the install routine. Kind of a big boo-boo that needs to be fixed ASAP.
Despite changing the default language to English I still saw some Japanese characters in the Firefox interface.
Beyond that I didn’t really run into any noticeable problems or issues with Vine Linux.
Vine Linux comes with Firefox 3.5.
(8 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5)
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(4.83 out of 5)
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.
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.
Fuer Anfaenger nicht zu empfehlen. Viele Programme sind in Vine veraltet wie firefox, viele fehlen wie openoffice und muessen sogar noch aus dem netz geladen werden. adobe flash ist nicht installiert. sonst waere es ein superprogramm.
Vine Linux looks super but the most instaled programs are too old or are missing. And where is openoffice? a pity, would be a super program.