[ginogsm]

VidaLinux 1.0 - A Gentoo clone.
Another way to say "Long Live Linux?"

Gentoo is a fairly new kid on the Linux distribution block. It has been in the area as a strong competitor to other well known distros like Red Hat, Suse, and Mandrake for about a year now. It is famous for its stability, the number of packages available for it, and that it integrates so well with the machine on which it is installed that it can decide which packages fit best for the current configuration. Only these? I'm afraid not.

Installing Gentoo can be challenging. Gentoo requires a lot of input from the user, and everything has to be done correctly in order to have a stable and strong system capable of accomplishing a number of difficult tasks. If you decide to install Gentoo, you also have decided to give your fingers and keyboard a real test. But it will also give the user a lesson about Linux: it is tough but good. And another one: search and you will find what exactly what you're looking for.

The average user would probably look for Gentoo with a graphics installation environment. This is where VidaLinux comes in. VidaLinux is Gentoo with the Red Hat installer, Anacoda, compiled into its installer to make everyone's life easier and the installation better to look at. It provides a common environment for anyone that has installed Red Hat Linux or Fedora Core, with the ease of use of Anacoda.

The installation starts with a request to press "Enter" to install VidaLinux or press one of the function keys, F1 to F5, to see more options. Then it detects the available hardware and continues with the localization of the system. After that the user has to pick a strong six-letter password for the root, then choose whether a firewall will be enabled or not, and what the trusted network devices will be. The final few steps are to set the host name and determine whether the IP will be received from a DHCP server or static. If it is static, you have to set it as well as the DNS server and the gateway.

Hardware recognition is amazing. I have installed VidaLinux in four different PCs and only a network card was not recognized by the system. It came with its own drivers for Linux, though, and was easily installed after the installation.

The localization gives the options to choose the keyboard that will be used, set the time zone by picking the closest city from a world map, and choose if more than one language will be installed.

The network settings step is, in fact, a matter of your personal or enterprise network setup. The password must be one you will surely remember, as it is pretty hard to retrieve if forgotten.

The last step is to choose which packages will be installed on the system. Anacoda decides that all should be installed and, as a matter of fact, this is what you should do. There are only the basic packages that come with the one installation CD. The basic drivers, X-server, Gnome, Apache, and VNC are the main packages. Samba isn't there, nor you will find Squid, Apache2, php, MySQL, Python, Ethereal, KDE, and others. Dissapointed? I don't think you should be. Go ahead, install it...

As soon as the installation is finished, a finely drawn screen will ask the user to enter a username and password. If the user is validated, then you will see a pretty familiar background. The screen this distro uses as the background resembles the Bliss screen which Windows XP uses. The user's next move is to press Control-Alt-F1 in order to switch to a console and use the magic command: emerge.

Emerge will the most commonly used command a VidaLinux user will utilize at first. This command allows one to download and auto-install any possible package wanted. The basic usage will be:

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emerge --pretend thepackage I want

This will allow VidaLinux to check to see if the thepackageIwant, the name meaning the package a certain user needs, is available for download and installation. This command will not download and install the package. It will only check the certain package's availability and the possible dependencies conflict. Then you can use:

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emerge thepackageIwant

VidaLinux will then download and install the certain package for you, checking and solving any possible dependencies problems. You can use this command for downloading and installing multiple packages at once, like this:

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emerge package1 package2 package3 ...

VidaLinux will serially download and install package1 then package2 and so on. Each package will create its own shortcuts in Gnome or KDE menus and will be fully installed. There will be no disabled items or features. The package requested will appear in its full glory.

After you have downloaded and installed everything you need, you can start working. And Vidalinux will help you do that. Its stability, inherited from Gentoo, and the safety of Linux will make your everyday work an enjoyable experience. I highly recommend it for workstation and server installations.