YOPER (Your OPERating system) promises to be a i686 optimized, fast linux distribution. The latest beta 3.1 was released to public testing on 22-April.

I decided to try YOPER only because it claims to be faster. "YOPER is a compact, personalized, and optimized operating system with support for apt-rpm and tgz packages. There are 1200 packages available, carefully selected and compiled for speed and stability. It has an automatic hardware detection system which should detect most modern hardware", is the extract given in the About YOPER page.

YOPER does not offer may options in the boot menu while booting from CD. The two options available were "Boot YOPER" and "Boot YOPER in Failsafe Mode" . I selected the "Boot YOPER" and the boot progress was shown in very large font. YOPER did not display boot splash screen and after a while it showed four options out of which I chose "Install YOPER" (another important option was "Live CD"). The installation was text based and offered simple steps. I configured the root/home/swap partitions and filesystem types(using cfdisk), chose GRUB as the boot loader and the actual installation started.

The installation started copying files and it took nearly 17 minutes(!!!) on the Inspiron 6400 laptop(1.6 GHZ core 2 duo & 1GB RAM) . The installation duration was a bit higher than a typical Linux installation. After the installation, I rebooted the system and I was disappointed to see that the grub loader did not install the boot loader in MBR. So I reinstalled with LILO as the boot loader. This time the boot loader was installed properly.

Hardware Issues:

While booting the YOPER first time, it asked for root's password and user account information. YOPER detected the Mobility Radeon X1400 and configured the correct resolution but after logging into KDE I noticed that the touchpad in the laptop was not working. Also the "radeonhd" driver made the virtual consoles unusable(garbled lines). I managed to install fglrx driver(not available in YOPER's repository) by using the keyboard and copied and restarted the system. The glxinfo showed that X was using mesa driver but as I was not sure how to fix this issue. I looked the fglrx log and found that the kernel module was not generated. I installed kernel-headers through the "SMART Package Manager" and reinstalled the fglrx driver. There were no errors this time but even after a reboot X did not switch to fglrx. I'm yet to try compiling the driver manually to generate the kernel module.

As the touchpad was not working I just copied the xorg.conf from my Ubuntu installation and after X server restart everything worked fine. I checked the front panel volume control buttons and it complained saying "No Mixer Found". So I decided to try an audio player and to my disappointment Amarok was not there. XMMS was the default audio player but it did not play the MP3s though the codecs were installed. I had to install the rpm "xmms-oss4" and change the output plug-in from ALSA to OSS to play the mp3s. VLC and Mplayer played my media files as desired. I also installed the "alsa-utils" and tried to configure my sound card but alsa failed to recognize the card.

When closing the laptop lid, it did not power off the LCD display. So I installed "kpowersave' and when I started the application it crashed. Another issue was whenever I switch off the ADSL modem, the interface changed to "inactive" state. I had to manually activate the interface everytime to connect to Internet.

The synaptic bug was already reported in the YOPER bug tracking system so I filed the "alsa" and "kpowersave" bugs. The bug tracking system YOPER uses was hard to use(whenever I try to attach a file of any type it complained "not a valid file type").

Working with YOPER

YOPER has one of the best looking KDM theme and splash screen. It also customized KDE with a mice looking dark colored theme . As open office was not included in the installation CD (KOffice was there), most of the KDE applications were installed.

As far as the performance is concerned, YOPER did not offer the speed levels offered by arch or gentoo (at least in this beta). Most of the applications worked well but at times the system responded poorly(some of these performance problems may be due to the ubuntu's xorg.conf). As this is still in beta I hope the final version will offer some speed improvements. I also installed KDE4 from YOPER's repositories but most of the KDE4 applications were missing in the YOPER repositories including Amarok2. I hope these will be available during the final release.

Another major issue was when I tried to activate my network interface in KDE4, I received a strange error and I could not activate the network card.

SMART Package Manager:

YOPER uses RPM packages and SMART as the package manager. SMART is also used by SUSE. This tool is very simple and worked without any issues but when I tried to uninstall the xorg-drv-ati(radeonhd) driver, it listed the most of the important desktop rpms including KDE and fluxbox as dependencies. SMART notified all the available updates and I was able to install them with just three mouse clicks. While installing a package from the Internet, SMART deleted the downloaded packages from the local hard disk(/var/lib/smart/packages) as soon as the installation was complete and I could not find way to avoid this behavior.

Where YOPER Scores:

1. Easy to use SMART package manager

2. The look and feel (themes/styles/colors etc)

3. Easy installation of the OS

I hope this list will have some more after the final release.

Where YOPER can Improve:

1. An option to install YOPER from the live CD environment (after booting into live CD)

2. Better hardware detection (more testers?).

3. More packages in the repositories.

4. A better bug-tracking system (bugzilla?).

Conclusion:

There are some rough edges as YOPER is still in beta. YOPER's repositories may not have some of the packages people are looking for. Also YOPER does not have a integrated control center like other major distributions do. YOPER may not be best suited for the beginners but for people who are ready to experiment with distributions, YOPER is worth trying.