Vida Linux 1.1 is based off of GENTOO (gentoo.org), which is a very stable and fast distribution, I will get on to some of the features included in VIDA.

* graphical or text Anaconda installation (same as fedora/redhat)
* Includes 2.6.9 kernel (kernel source guide on desktop.vidalinux.com)
* Includes latest version of X.org
* Includes Gnome 2.8
* Includes Portage

What is portage?
Well, portage is gentoo's package manager, except it is more powerful than most, probally all other distributions.

EMERGE, emerge is great, go into console, and you can keep your system up to date, with a lot of ease.

for example, say you want to install kde, or kdebase, all you do is type, emerge kdebase, and it will download all the dependencies and it will compile and install them in order.

emerge has millions of packages, anything you can think of, it has every kde package, it even had xmms-themes, xmms mplayer plugin, mplayer, and everything else you'll ever want.

So, if you don't like the default gnome installed, type emerge kdebase, and you will have the NEWEST version of kde installed.

You may know debian's package manager (dpkg) and you may know it comes with something similar to emerge (apt-get)

apt-get has few differences from emerge
1) 10x less packages
2) doesn't compile or optimize package for your system

to sum it all up, you will never need to download another package, unless it is MASKED in portage, and you can not get to it.

any distribution can do what gentoo does, with the source files, except gentoo makes it 20x easier and faster than all other distros.

SCREENSHOT of my vidalinux 1.1 desktop.
http://www.f-designs.net/Screenshot.png

Tried to install Gentoo but I never quite got it to work on my system for reasons that will probably never be known. I thought that i was out of luck because portage looked like such a great package manager.

Then I discovered VidaLinux - which is basicly a stage 3 Gentoo system with a GUI installer (actually uses Red Hat's Anaconda installer). Installation was a breeze. Although I'm not that fond of Gnome it is a good looking setup. KDE can be emerged at my leisure i suppose.

On the other hand, Porthole, the GUI frontend to Portage, crashed when I tried to sync. I switced to command line and I suppose that it is just as easy.

Gnome and porthole aside, I think I've found my distro of choice!

It is a quick start to Gentoo. Sure it has Gnome by default, but disabling GDM and using your own WM is easy enough.

I had plenty of trouble getting Gentoo to work from scratch on a slow connection, if you've experienced the same trouble but want the power of portage and the incredible user-base of Gentoo there for all your problems, then VLOS is for you!

Their are two things that seem to define Vidalinux from Gentoo:

Porthole as a graphical package manager, emerge is plenty easy enough in the terminal, best to stick with it isntead.

Vidalinux-kernel, it is okay, but there are more up-to-date kernel's available: 2.6.9 works nicely enough, however.


It is always nice to have a well-supported WM to fall back on if you are just starting out with Gentoo, VLOS is worth a try.

I tried this distro a couple of years ago and liked it - I managed to turn it in to a complete Gentoo distro by rebuilding everything and updating the profile to the latest Gentoo one.

The only advantage this distro offered really, was the installer.