This Old Blog

I try to hit the Distrowatch site on a fairly regular basis, usually once every week. That's so I can read the Distrowatch Weekly. This week's issue carries another review of Fedora 8. While the review is interesting in and of itself, it carries within it other little nuggets about several other distributions the author has tried along the way. The author was running Sabayon 3.4 before switching over to Fedora 8. I tried Sabayon on my machines , so it was interesting to read about his experiences. He offered this interesting observation: It [Fedora 8] is considerably less buggy than Sabayon Linux 3.4... Ouch. Another key observation pro Sabayon is the time the author spent configuring his desktop. He noted that while he had to go and hunt down media codecs for Fedora 8, Sabayon "comes pre-configured with all the media goodies and browser plugins a desktop Linux user could possibly need." I've read similar observations with regards to Sabayon; buggy in many ways,...

Well, I did what I said I'd do, and downloaded Sabayon 3.4f and booted it on the Gateway M680. Just as before with 3.4e I booted Sabayon into a Compiz-enabled graphic desktop. This time the keyboard worked, but other problems led to a less than ideal user experience. Gateway M680 Problems The Compiz 3D effects interfere with the KDE Kickoff menu. The Compiz 3D effects interfere with (some) USB devices. Solutions Boot Sabayon without Compiz enabled. When the system boots into the first selection menu simply choose to boot without Compiz enabled. If you must boot with the eye candy, then when you get to the desktop right-click immediately on the menu button on the lower panel and select the older KDE menu. It works with the older menu. However, switching from the KDE Kickoff menu to the older KDE menu creates a new problem. Look at the screen shot above. Note how the applets in the upper panel (upper right) are little tiny windows immediately beneath the positions they had on the upp...

Since I'm in the mood to boot live CDs on notebooks, I decided to continue this little experiment by booting Sabayon 3.4e on both notebooks. While Sabayon booted to a graphical desktop on both machines, the experience was a little better on the M685 than on the M680. I didn't download this, I got it as an insert tucked inside the November issue of Linux Pro Magazine , which I picked up at a local Barnes and Noble bookstore tonight. Booting One of the nicest features of this distribution is its opening boot. Rather than watching some fancy artwork you're presented with a first-boot screen that identifies the graphic subsystem and allows you to select graphic acceleration or not. Sabayon correctly detected and identified both notebook's graphics chip sets. In both cases I choose graphic acceleration and when it finished booting into the desktop graphic acceleration was indeed enabled. By the way, not only do you get a very solid indication of successful graphical configu...