Sabayon Linux 3.4 review

A bright red star at open horizon
Sabayon is the new name for earlier RR4 distribution. It is based on Gentoo and modified according to the needs of users. It comes in two version; one full DVD version and another in single CD mini-edition. Recently they have also launched a Business Edition for Sabayon.

This is what the project has to say on its website "Get rid of Microsoft Windows. Install the Sabayon Linux Operating System and unleash the full potential of your Computer. Sabayon Linux features the most advanced Industry Open Source technologies: no hassles."

You can visit the project homepage read about it more and see some more screenshots.

Test Machine
This is one distro that has been occupying one partion on my personal workstation. Its a dual core 3.4 GHz intel processor, with 4 Gig RAM and 512 MB Nvidia 7950 graphics card. I have a dual 19" wide screen monitors which support 1440x900@75Hz.

Booting
Sabayon gives you a lot of options for booting. The default option is full fledged live CD environment. Sabayon has supported accelerated graphics even in live CD environment for a long time (with the help of proprietary drivers). When you boot in the live CD user is given an option to select the acceleration package to be used; namely AIGLX or XGL or no acceleration. This is one unique configuration that is not available with other distributions.

The live CD could not start my Xserver at desired resolution of 1440x900, instead it was just able to have 1024x768 even with required nvidia drivers loaded. I think it has to do something with the accelerated graphics. But any way the resolution was enough for installing my system.

When you log in to live environment, you see a really nice blend of red and black. This makes sabayon a lot different from standard blue style, found in other distros. On the desktop you see nvidia driver configuration icon. Also there are lots of games ready to be tested.

Installation
The installation icon is placed on the desktop. Sabayon uses a modified version of Anaconda (well known redhat installer) for installation. The installation is lengthy but complete with all configuration. Installer detects your wireless network card and allows you to configure it during the installation.

Anaconda ask for language, keyboard and allows you to configure partitions. It asks which desktop environment you want to have; namely gnome, kde or fluxbox. KDE is the default desktop and fluxbox if for users who have power restrained systems.

Installer then asks for different group of applications that you want to install. There are lot of games to be installed and played on linux, and sabayon proves this point very well. For the blogger who says that linux is not ready for gaming, i say "go check Sabayon".

The installation process is lengthy, processor intensive and time consuming. For my machine it took approximately one hour to finish. For a system that is more that 2 years old, it can very well take four or more hours.



Aesthetics
The theme adopted by sabayon is different at the best. I feel that the theme aspect is half cooked in sabayon. If doesn't feel like one continuous theme. At some places the theme puts extra strain on eyes. If you try to run any GTK based applications the menu entries are completely unreadable. The console starts with prompt color light green with white background, a color combination that is hard to differentiate.



Applications
Being a DVD based installation there is a really huge set of applications. Sabayon uses Portage as application manager. Thus the applications installed are really fast and optimized to the tastes for the user. There is a front-end for Portage with the name protato which helps in finding and installing applications.

Google Earth, Google Picasa, skype and virtual box are some of the applications installed by default in sabayon that you will not find in an other distribution.

Qt, bean shell and glade are installed by default for application development. With all other unique applications, I was expecting eclipse to be installed by default but I think I was expecting too much.

For games all the standard gnome and kde games are installed by default. And along with that there are a lot of 3D games to try out; Danger from the deep, Savage, Nezuiz, sauerbraten, Second life, Battle for Wesnoth and many more.

A lot of applications are also installed for graphics; DjVu, gimp, picasa, digikam, fspot, kooka etc. Same goes with interenet applications; azureus, google earth, filezilla, wireshark, amule, firefox, thunderbird, skype, NX, wlan manager. Coming to multimedia application you see the same trend; mplayer, real player, kaffeine, dvd::rip, elisa, lightscribe labeler, tvtime and so on. Open Office 2.2. is installed for office productivity suite.

I wanted to see a specialized control center for sabayon to make it more user friendly, but it was missing. Except that, I think i was very much impressed by what sabayon has to offer to a new user.

Eye Candy
Sabayon is the only distribution to include the new compiz fusion 3D accelration manager to provide great eye candy to the user. Compiz fans have a reason to rejoice, compiz now works with xinerama.

Configuration options for compiz, are enourmous, there are lots of plug ins to add extra effect. Its just plain fun game to configure and use different effects.

Multimedia
Sabayon comes pre-loaded with all the required codecs. I was able to view DVD, listen mp3 files, watch windows media files.

Conclusion
Sabayon is one distribution that can give all major distributions a run for their money and it is almost there as well. The power of open source can not be felt with binary distribution packages, the real power comes with custom compilation, and an environment that provides an easy way to do the same. Sabayon is the kind of environment that one should be looking at if s/he wants to harness the true power.

Hope that sabayon mantains its right track and iron out the rough corners so that we can rely on a really briliant star.

Freespire Review

Freespire - a new step towards freedom
Freespire is a comunity version for commercial Linspire. The latest alpha 2U was released on 22nd March, 2007. You can visit freespire site here. Some of extra screenshots are also available here.

Generally I avoid reviewing distributions that as in beta phase. It seems like commenting on half cooked solution, when everyone knows that it is not finished yet. But I would like to make an excetpion in case of Freespire.

Test Machine
So my test machine is a bit old; five years to be precise. It is having AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (overclocked), 1 Gig RAM, 64 Meg ATI 7200 graphics card. It has enough meat for trying out an average desktop distribution.

Booting
Freespire CD gives you option to boot in Live CD and install the distribution directly. Oddly the option for live CD is not the default one. The default option is to install the distro. Anyway this is a matter of personal preference.

The booting process is similar to what is seen in ubuntu. The default color scheme is blue and I really liked the kind of blue used by freespire. Freespire correctly identified 1280x1024@75Hz for my 19" monitor, and started KDE.

Once you are on the desktop you will surely notice the marvelous icons bolsted by Freespire. Its just great. On the desktop you see NTFS drives automatically mounted. Gnome partition editor (gnome partition editor is much powerful than Qtparted and its a good decision of include it here). You have icon for CNR (Click and Run) stating 'coming soon'.

Installation
On the desktop you see an icon to install freespire link on the desktop. It opens a full screen application. The installation application ask for keyboard layout and installation method. There are two installation methods "Take over an entire hard disk" and "Advanced install".I prefer the latter as I have several operating systems installed on the single hard drive.

In advanced installation method you select root partition and whether you want to write boot loader in Master Boot Record. Then it asks for computer name, User name and administrator password. Actually, its misleading to say administrator password, it is the user password used for sudo. This can lead to some confusions.

With all these steps you are ready to install the operation system. It displays the final configuration screen asking for your confirmation. The installation takes just under 5 minutes. The installer displays time elapsed and approximate time remaining.

Aesthetics
As mentioned earlier the blue in blue blend is awesome. The specialized icons are really great. The earlier versions of freespire that I saw were more or less morphing windows; they had menu button renamed as start but now that is gone. The new menu buttons have really good Freespire icons. The default menu bar also looks more like KDE then XP. The automatic login is not configured by default. In my opinion, for a single user desktop , user should have a installation option where s/he can choose to have auto login or not (something I really like about mandriva).

On first login user is prompted for a license agreement. I think lot of people out there who really don't bother about the license agreement, and so I just agreed to it. Then you are given screen to configure different aspects of your system, like sound settings, Time zone, screen resolution, etc. But all settings applets have to switch to administrator mode to change, i.e. you have to enter your password. Otherwise its really great and all the aspects of configuration are covered.

One thing that I did not like is that by default, the fonts are really big, anti-aliasing is not turned on and the font families are mixed a lot. Any ways, these are just configurations and should not be a big problem.

Applications
It seems freespire chose to not let off all the XP style configuration. All the applications are still under programs menu. Seeing that it is a single CD installation, the applications select is almost complete.

For development we have Nvu, and a few games are also thrown in. You have a good set for internet applications; Java 6, Flash, Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin, Ktorrent, Konqueror etc. For multimedia you have Real Player, Lsongs, KMix, K3b. Open office 2.2 is installed as office application.

Multimedia
MP3 played well out of the box. Real player 10 is configured as default player applications for audio files. For video files, you have KMPlayer with all the necessary codes installed by default. I did not have any problem watching DVDs and windows media files.

Conclusion
Freespire is an appealing distribution for new comers and once the CNR is fully implemented it will really be one of the easiest distributions to use. I will recommend it to all the newbies and KDE aficionados. For M$ users if you are thinking about the switch and don't want to go through the noisy ubuntu forum Freespire is there for you

Wolvix 1.1 Hunter Review

Fast and elegant
Today I am trying Wolvix Hunder Live CD. Wolvix was a remastered SLAX CD, but currently they have changed there base to good old slackware. The live CD provides plenty of cheat codes, available here. Wolvix uses XFCE as its desktop environment.

Test Machine
So today I am using my old test machine, AMD athlon 2600+ XP, 1 Gig RAM, 64 Meg ATI 7200 with 15" LCD capable of 1024x768@75Hz

Booting
Booting is really fast and boasts of a grey theme. I likes the theme as it makes me remember the old days when computer monitors used to be black & while. The root password is toor and not mentioned anywhere on the login screen. I tried the password because I knew thats what slax uses.

Installation
The hard disk installer is currently in testing stage and can not be trusted much. It is located inside Wolvix control panel and there is no shortcut on the desktop. There are two installation methods, full and furgal. I tried out the full installation.

The installer is least intrusive and most helpful, it gives you an option to run gparted to make/resize partions on your hard drive. Six questions are asked by the installer; 1. Boot Device, 2. Root Partition, 3. (Optional) /home, 4. Swap, 5. Filesystem, 6. Install Grub, 7. Install. The installation process is really fast, it took approximately 5 mins to copy all the desired files to selected partion.

Once the installation is complete, it asks couple of questions. GUI Login or text login, Framebuffer required. Wolvix installer also identified other operating systems installed on the machine, but it could not successfully retreive their names. Also odly enough it gives an option by which user can skip the wolvix entry in grub. I think it is bad taste.

Aesthetics
As mentioned earlier, the default theme is grey, and it is a nicely designed theme that does not extert strain on eyes. The menus are all colored and look really great. The whole wolvix theme is one continuous theme and everythings seems to be though over very well.

System utilization is shown on the desktop, blended with the wallpaper. This display can also be turned on an off selectively.

Applications
The applications are selected keeping a average desktop user in mind. For normal accessories, catfish, gnome commander, medit, Xpad are really good choices. XFCE does not have a samba viewer, but gnome commander acts as a really good samba viewer, I just wonder why did I not use it till now on XFCE based systems.

Bluefish editor, kompozer, meld diff viewer, scite are available to development realated activities. Some games are also included, along with couple of standard graphics applications. There is huge set of multimedia applications; dvd::rip, vlc media player, kino, mplayer, xine, gtkpod, gpodder podcast client and more.

For internet related applications; firefox, thunderbird, dillo, pidgin, phNeighbourhood, wifi radar are also included. Seeing all the mozilla related stuff I wonder why a lot of distributions leave out sunbird; its a calendar application from mozilla and really a good one. Open Office is installed for application with all the variants. I remember someone lately blogged that open office is not equivalent to M$ Office as it does not include an equivalent of M$ Access. But I feel its not his fault as a lot of distributions leave out Open Office Base; which is included in the default installation.

Multimedia
Wolvix comes preloaded with all the codecs. MPlayer is the default application used for MP3 and windows media files. DVD also played flawlessly.

Eye Candy
Wolvix does not come with any eye candy. And I think it goes well with the distro priorities. In my opinion wolvix is meant for older computer to provide excelent user interface.

Conclusion

According to the project website "Wolvix is a LiveDistro built from Slackware and the Linux-Live scripts. It's a desktop and multimedia oriented Linux distribution designed to suit the needs of regular to advanced desktop users."

I am not sure how will it work out for advanced desktop users, as lot of them will have preferences regarding KDE and GNOME. But for an average desktop perspective it is really great distro which runs really well on older computer.