Saturday, March 07, 2015

Retro!

Was nosing through some old CDs and came across some of the development discs for Yoper. Found 2.0, a core version of 2.2 (command line only stuff!) and a 2.2 pre release dev version.
Decided to spin them up in a Virtualbox VM for old times. Probably not the core version - it won't be terribly interesting these days to try to develop scripts and so on to fix non working things!

The first thing which hits me is how dire the actual installing is by comparison to todays distros. It certainly works, but very much text based and with a less than intuitive partitioning system.Compared to say Xubuntu or PCLOS, it isn't easy to follow - but of course, this Yoper was from 2005 - and I don't recall many distros being easy on the new user back then!

My first VM install was of the old 2.0 version of Yoper - which is what got me interested in working on the distro. It brought back some old memories of fun (and frustrating!) times, trying to get things which should have been simple enough - like getting a dial up modem to "just work" or setting up Samba!

We were quite lucky with Yoper because the original developer, Andreas, had made the decision to use the Knoppix hardware detecting tools - so most things did work straight away - but being 2005, there were still lots of dreadful WinModems etc to bring a user to tears!

No great issues getting 2.0 up and running on VB - and it looked lovely! The classic old KDE 3.x interface, still miles better than the 4.x version IMHO - especially when tweaked a little as the Yoper version was.

No updates available really of course - this is purely a nostalgia hit. I could, I suppose, install something from my old RPM builds. I left some old Yoper RPMs on my server, so I suppose they will work as long as they don't need anything from the main repos which no longer exist.

Personally, I think it was a mistake to move away from the 2.x Yoper version and all the development which had gone into it, however, the guy who took over the reins, Tobias, decided to take a new route with Yoper 3.x, with a new package manager, new build system etc.
I can understand why he did it, but it wasn't really my thing, and, with health issues and so on, I found myself unable to continue playing a part with the distro.
A shame really, because I really enjoyed my time with the Yoper team and I am sure we all expanded our Linux understanding during the development time.

2.2 seems a little - well, ugly is perhaps an unkind word, so lets call it "less attractive than v2.0!"
No separate password for root either.
I didn't get the networking to work either - but that may be the fickle nature of the VM (but it DID work with 2.0 and other distros....)!

Anyway, have spent a pleasant time messing with these discs. Hope to find the final 2.2.0-x at some point - think it was release 6