Nov

25

Fedora 10 Launches!

Category: Fedora | Leave a Comment

Linux Format Magazine already has a review.

And here’s the release announcement:

DATELINE: 2008-11-25

KEY FINGERPRINT: 61A8 ABE0 91FF 9FBB F4B0 7709 BF22 6FCC 4EBF C273

LOCATION: GEOSYNC ORBIT, FEDORA SPACE STATION VIA GLOBAL IRC NETWORK

BROADCASTING: FREEDOM FRIENDS FEATURES FIRST

(Cue J. Strauss' "Blue Danube.")

THIS IS FEDORA SPACE OPERATIONS ANNOUNCING with great pleasure the
successful launch of the new ship, Fedora 10: "Cambridge."

Strapped into the pilot seats are the latest GNOME (2.24) and KDE (4.1),
accompanied on their amazing journey by an all star crew of glitch free
audio, better printing and webcam support, and a new faster graphical
startup.

Also on this ride are wireless connection sharing and the next evolution
in PackageKit, hooking through your multimedia applications to help
install supporting software (codecs).

For developers and system administrators on this mission, we have built
in appliance tools, Eclipse 3.4, NetBeans IDE, improved virtualization
management with remote installation and storage capabilities, RPM 4.6,
and new security auditing toolsets.

Please remember to polarize viewports to properly enjoy Cambridge's
brand new graphics theme, "Solar," shining on the desktop. Also on this
flight is a new lightweight desktop environment, LXDE, joining the more
recent desktop envionment crew member, Sugar (from the starship OLPC
XO), and the venerable GNOME, KDE, and XFCE.

We are now leaving drydock for a 13-month mission of innovation and
exploration. Crew members and guests are invited to the forward lounge
to use, study, modify, and redistribute.

Get your copy of Fedora 10 today:

http://get.fedoraproject.org/

Join the many thousands of Fedora particpants and contributors:

http://join.fedoraproject.org/

If you missed the official launch, attend a Fedora 10 Launch Party near
you:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraEvents/ReleaseParty
  

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Nov

22

Review: Zenwalk 5.2

Category: Linux | 9 Comments

Somewhere along the line I got into my head that Slackware was a distro that involved having to compile everything. From what I can gather from Wikipedia, The Slackware Website, and some comments to my Gentoo post, I was wrong. Gentoo apparently uses packages, just like every other modern distro. The difference is that dependency resolution (at least with the default first-party tools) is up to the user. This clears up so much for me because I always wondered why someone would want to make a distribution based off of Slackware if the point of Slackware was to compile from source and be super hardcore. After all, Slackware doesn’t baby you and give you all these little GUIs to configure your system. You need to get down and dirty with Emacs (or even dirties with Vi) and edit those config files. Here’s what the Slackware site gives as the reason to use Slackware:

The Official Release of Slackware Linux by Patrick Volkerding is an advanced Linux operating system, designed with the twin goals of ease of use and stability as top priorities. Including the latest popular software while retaining a sense of tradition, providing simplicity and ease of use alongside flexibility and power, Slackware brings the best of all worlds to the table.

Originally developed by Linus Torvalds in 1991, the UNIX®-like Linux operating system now benefits from the contributions of millions of users and developers around the world. Slackware Linux provides new and experienced users alike with a fully-featured system, equipped to serve in any capacity from desktop workstation to machine-room server. Web, ftp, and email servers are ready to go out of the box, as are a wide selection of popular desktop environments. A full range of development tools, editors, and current libraries is included for users who wish to develop or compile additional software.

I had a bit of a chuckle at “ease of use” and “latest popular software”. Ease of use compared to which distro? I had the strange feeling that this description hadn’t been updated since back in the days when Slackware was easier than SLS Linux. That’s right! Slackware was the original Ubuntu. And as far as having the latest software…. I think they only recently went to the 2.6 kernel, which I think every other distro has used for the last five years. And, according to an interview I heard on Linux Outlaws, they are still shipping with Apace 1.3 as the default when Apache 2 is needed for most web projects nowadays.

So what are the advantages of Slackware? It’s the most UNIX-Like system. I don’t know what that means - but if you like Unix, you’ll like Slackware. It’s very stable. If you though Debian was cautious - here’s Slackware. Everyone seems to always mention stability with Slackware. Then there’s the vanilla aspect of it. Slackware has a reputation for giving you KDE as the KDE team envisioned it - not as some packager at Canonical or Red Hat envisioned it. For example, Xubuntu has a long bar across the bottom of the screen instead of the default XFCE setup of one small bar on bottom and one large one at top.

So there’s room here for Zenwalk to take this great bedrock of Slackware and build upon it to truly make it easy to use. Since the Zenwalk team is using Slackware as its basis, instead of Debian or Fedora, I expect for it to give me all the power of Slackware. I don’t want the GUIs trouncing all over my configuration files. But I do want GUIs if I prefer them. Zenwalk is often touted as a good distro to run on frugal hardware. But, I’m not going to stack it up against the other lightweight distros because Zenwalk was meant to be installed and not run as a liveCD that could be installed if you wanted to. (Although there IS a liveCD version of Zenwalk) One more thing - from what I’ve read about Zenwalk, although it began life as Minislack, it is not a derivative of Slackware in the same way that Ubuntu is to Debian. People can feel free to correct me in the comments, but it appears that it started based off of Slackware and then blossomed up into its own distro. However, it still maintains binary compatibility with Slackware, so whatever works with Slack should also work with Zenwalk. Well, I think that’s enough setup, let’s get this thing installed on Virtualbox.

I hit enter. I end up in an ncurses dialog.

I went with the autoinstall since I am dedicating the entire disk to Zenwalk. I hit ok a couple of times and the installation begins.

It’s not the prettiest installation, but it certainly is the most INFORMATIVE installation I’ve ever done of a Linux distro. I then chose the simple LILO install (a little over 30 minutes later). A few dialogues later I set the timeszone. Then it was time to select the startup services and reboot. And here’s the rather neat looking Zenwalk lilo screen:

Zenwalk then boots up with a nice graphical boot, BUT (VERY IMPORTANTLY as far as I’m concerned) it gives you the option of seeing the verbose output.

Then it does something I don’t think I can recall any other distro ever doing - it presents the user with the GPL. It’s funny because on the one hand it’s more like Windows and Mac in that it’s presenting the license upon first boot. But neither of those two has the wording “The license for most software…is to take away your rights.” Unfortunately I accidentally hit enter and couldn’t get back to it for a screenshot. Then I accepted the license for Adobe (probably for Flash or Reader) . Then alsa tried to detect my audio hardware. Then it was time to enter the root password and create users. Conveniently, it added me to all the groups I would need to actually use the system. Then the graphical login:

Ok, so I went into this wondering if Zenwalk could take Slackware’s benefits and then make it easier for the user - after all, if it couldn’t do that then why not just use Slackware? So for the install, I have to say that it was a very easy install for a Linux vet. I think anyone that’s done more than one Linux install could install Zenwalk easily. Even for a first time install - there wasn’t anything in there that was any more technical than what users get asked in any other Linux distro. It just loses points for not explaining things as much as others and for not being pretty. I was thinking today of how stupid it is that people call distros non-user friendly just because they use ncurses. As long as it’s asking the exact same thing as a GUIfied install, what’s the big deal? Well, now it’s time for me to log in.

So they use a nice littel informative display instead of the default Xfce rat. It gives the user an idea of what’s going on and why they can see their desktop, but not yet use it. Here’s the screen you get upon first boot. A very nice looking Xfce desktop.

I like the background and the icon set chosen.  Interesting differences I noticed when compared to Xfce in Fedora:  Zenwalk has the program menu in the top left corner while Fedora has it in the bottom panel.  Zenwalk only has 2 desktops by default and has the switcher in the top.  Fedora has four desktokps by default.  I also like Zenwalk’s folder icon set.

The title bar REALLY gets on my nerves, though.  I don’t know what it is about the shade of blue they’ve chosen along with the black outline on the minimize, maximize, and exit buttons, but it really gets in my nerves in a bad way.

Just like Debian, Zenwalk uses Iceweasel instead of Firefox; interestingly, it is version 2.0.  I’m not sure if this is because I haven’t updated or if this is as modern as Zenwalk 5.2 goes when it comes to Firefox.  Come to speak of it, I have not had any notification whatsoever that I need to update any packages.  I don’t know if this is because there aren’t any new packages available or if Zenwalk just doesn’t tell you in your desktop manager like modern Fedora and Ubuntu.  I’ll check into that momentarily.  Other programs in Zenwalk 5.2 are GIMP 2.4, Geany 0.14, Asunder 1.5 for ripping music, Gnome-Mplayer 0.6.2, Brasero for burning discs, GMusicBrowser for music, IceDove, Pidgin 2.4.2, Abiword, Gnumeric, and a few others I didn’t mention.  They really do stick to one program per task for Zenwalk.  The result is a neat, if sparesely populated, menu.

Zenwalk has a settings page that reminds me of Windows’ Control Panel.  Mandriva always gets good marks for this so it must be a good thing:

I see a package called Netpkg which I assume is for managing packages.  So far Zenwalk gets LOTS of points for the experience.  The internet just worked out of the box.  X worked.  All of this without having to edit any configuration files.  So far they are succeeding at being an easy-to-use version of Slackware.  But then it all comes falling down at Netpkg.  How in the world will any user know that is to install programs?  I think it should say Program Installation (Netpkg) or Netpkg (Program Installation).  Of course, it’s possible that someone who’s installed Zenwalk probably knows a bit more about Linux than an Ubuntu user, so perhaps they know to go read the manual online and figure out how to install new software.  More fail.  What would you do here if you have never used Linux before:

It says welcome to Netpkg.  But that’s it.  I guess you click on the pull down menu and then click on the globe icon.  But I have no idea.  Perhaps with all that empty space under Netpkg it could be communicated to the users what in the world they’re supposed to do.  Big fail there.  AND I was wrong.  You click on the arrow and select your mirror, but THEN you click the little refresh icon next to it.  NOT the Earth icon.

Anyway, I appear not to have any updates.  So looks like Firefox 2.0 (via Iceweasel) is the version Zenwalk is using for now.  (I clicked on a current mirror)  Oh no, I clicked on a restricted current mirror.  I fix that an there IS an upgrade.  And that makes a lot more sense.  I couldn’t imagine them sticking to Firefox 2.0.  Here’s what it looks like:

Any folder with a rotating arrow by it is a category containing updates.  If you click on any of them you get some info on the package being updated.  However, like Fedora prior to version 8 or 9, there is no mention of why the update is taking place.  So, it doesn’t say, update such and such a package for security reasons.  So I guess it’s up to the user to know what’s necessary to update and what can wait.  To keep it simple, I select Iceweasel 3.0 and click the globe icon.

For some bizarre reason you are able to install it without the dependencies.  If you did this, it would not work.  Don’t know why that’s there.  BUT Zenwalk does get easiness points here.  Why?  Because one of the things that annoys people about Slackware is that installing a package does not also install the dependencies.

After this process was over I had Iceweasel 3.0.4.  Overall it was a pretty easy process once I figured out what to do.

There aren’t any games installed by default, but there are quite a few available in the repos.  Blender is at version 2.46.  This isn’t too conservative a choice - I think Debian is still on 2.44 or earlier.  Fedora, for comparison, is at 2.48.

So my conclusion is that Zenwalk is doing a good job at what it set out to do - be an easy to use version of Slackware.  When installing packages, it calculates dependencies whereas Slackware does not.  While I’m sure I could do it if I wanted to, I did not need to edit any config files in order to get things working.  It appears to be a good distro.  It didn’t have anything tantalizing enough to make me decide to switch to Zenwalk, but it wasn’t a bad distro at all.  I think if I were first getting into Linux and hadn’t yet chosen a distro, I might go with Zenwalk.  It appears that it deserves all the praise people heap onto it.  If you’re distro-hopping make sure you make Zenwalk a stop on your journey.

  

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Nov

8

Ubuntu 8.10 does away with xorg.conf

Category: ubuntu | 7 Comments

One of the biggest Ubuntu stories on the net is the elimination of xorg.conf.  They haven’t made it unnecessary, they’ve completely eliminated it.  If you create one and edit it - it will have no effect.  I have not yet upgrade to 8.10, so I can’t verify it, but so far I haven’t seen any news to the contrary.  I think this is very much against the spirit of Linux.  I think that people should not have to know that an xorg.conf exists, but I think if you are “smart” enough to know about it and want to muck about then you should be able to.  Perhaps you want to run your monitor at a non-standard resolution or refresh rate; Or maybe the default settings don’t work well.  Ubuntu - let’s make xorg.conf available for the tweakers and uncessary for the tyros.  Then we will have the best of both worlds.

  

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Nov

7

KDE 4 Second Time Around

Category: Fedora, KDE | Leave a Comment

I’ve been spending time in KDE on the weekends since I usually don’t need to update my podcasts (which I manage in Rythmbox) and here are my current impressions.  Now that the latest nVidia drivers have come out, I was able to enable the desktop composite effects in KDE.  This does not use Compiz, but rather KWin’s built-in effects.  The default effects were nice.  They slowed up my computer a little, but I was still able to run Blender, which is more than I can do in Gnome with Compiz turned on.

I finally learned how to make the panel only show the programs open on that desktop.  Apparently, I just hadn’t found the magic spot to right-click on the panel to bring up a menu that has a simple checkbox to do that.

So far my only complaint is that KDE 4 is uglier than Gnome 2.x.  I can’t put my finger one what it is, but something offends my visual senses.  Particularly, I don’t like how Kontact looks.  I think it looks heavily 1990s.  The calendar part, in particular, doesn’t seem as polished as Evolution.

However, there are a lot of great things going on.  The widgets are really neat and better than any equivalent thing happening in Gnome.  I will keep checking them out to see where it ends up.  Also, I’m anxious to see where Amarok 2 takes us.

  

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Nov

6

Installing and Running Warcraft III via Wine

Category: Video Games, ubuntu | Leave a Comment

First I updated Wine to 1.0.0 (It didn’t work properly on 0.94) on Ubuntu.  In there I have D as the CDROM drive. So I typed wine d:\install.exe  This installed just fine

Here’s what happened with 0.94 when I first started this post:

But the first time I clicked to play it, it did not work. The screen just went blank.
When I restarted X, edited the registry keys as it says to do on the Wine site and started it up, this time it started up
When I tried to play the first campaign it froze up Gnome so I restarted X again
Wine FAQ says the movies folder should be renamed for stability reasons

Then, a few months later I updated to Wine 1.0 and suddenly it worked just fine and I was able to get into missions.  So Wine continues to improve and you can play more and more of your Windows games on Linux.

  

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Nov

5

Review: CentOS 5.2

Category: Red Hat | 7 Comments

This month’s Linux Format Magazine came with CentOS 5.2 on the disc. CentOS, in case you don’t know, is a community supported version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. (RHEL) Again, in the unlikely case you don’t know - Red Hat is required to supply the source code to all GPL code it uses in RHEL. What they don’t have to do is supply the Source RPMs which make it extremely easy for a distro like CentOS to exist. They can take the SRPMs and just remove the Red Hat artwork/logos and repackage it off as their own. The GPL allows this. Why in the world would Red Hat do this? They are, in a way, helping for a gratis version of their distro to exist and take away money that might otherwise go to them.

Well, here’s my take on it - which could be completely wrong. If a company out there wants to have a gratis distro, there are plenty from which to make its pick. It could use Debian, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Gentoo, Slackware…the list goes on. So the fact that there are many gratis Linux distros out there means that they aren’t just competing against gratis. But, you might argue, those distros are not RHEL so they don’t really compete. Ok, then the company could use Fedora because Fedora is upstream for RHEL. So Fedora is what RHEL will look like in a future release. But Fedora tends to be bleeding edge and is only supported for 18 months. (edit: I think it’s actually only supported for 13 months…)The current version of Red Hat is supported until 2014!  So what is their reason making things easy for CentOS?

I believe it’s two-fold.  First, the CentOS team wants a good distro so they participate in the RHEL betas to try and make sure they can catch as many bugs as possible.  So Red Hat gets a free bug-testing and development team without any extra expenditures.  But, more importantly, Red Hat gains mind-share.  Right now there are two major corporate Linux distros - Red Hat and Suse.  If you can get people used to the Red Hat way of doing things by allowing them to cut their teeth on CentOS, they will probably remain loyal to Red Hat, get Red Hat certified, and push for Red Hat in their workplace.  I think that’s probably the biggest thing Red Hat gets in all of this.  I could be completely wrong, but I know Red Hat isn’t doing this out of the kindness of their heart.  They are a publicly traded company with shareholders to answer to.  If giving away the SRPMs was harmful to the revenue stream you can bet they’d be forced to stop that in a heart-beat.

Well, enough with the history lesson.  I’ve run Fedora ever since Fedora 1 when I first got into Linux because I wanted to run my own web server.  Eventually I switched to FreeBSD because of the difficulty in doing rolling upgrades in Fedora.  Had I heard about CentOS at the time, I might be running that now on my server since it has much longer support terms.  Centos 5.2 is binary-compatible with RHEL 5.2.  This means that any program that runs on RHEL 5.2 should run “exactly” the same on Centos 5.2.  According to wikipedia, RHEL 5 is based on Fedora Core 6.  So, I’ll take a look and see just what this means when it comes to using CentOS.  I’m going to aim for a desktop setup as opposed to a server setup as RHEL also has a desktop configuration.  I’ll be installing it in VirtualBox.  So here we go.

This looks exactly the same as when I’ve installed Fedora.  I tell it to do the graphical boot as I’m very familiar with that.

It’s absolutely no shock that CentOS uses Anaconda and looks exactly like a Fedora install.  Just as Fedora has done for a while now (since 5 or so), the drive is formatted with Logical Volume Management (LVM).  I am very shocked, considering that most people probably run CentOS/RHEL as a server that the default partitioning is to have everything on / instead of a separate /var and /home.  For the most part, it’s an extremely uneventful installation routine for someone that’s installed Fedora over 10 times.

I stick with a Gnome desktop and also add Packages from CentOS Extras.  Since Fedora 6 is from before the merger of Core and Extras, I am sure to want packages from CentOS Extras.  Then I began the actual package installation and went to bed because I was very tired and, in my experience, Fedora takes 15-20 minutes to install on a good day.  When I woke up it was ready for the first reboot.

The rest was just as easy as Fedora.  And sound worked!  Of course, since it’s based on Fedora 6, it uses the old version of GDM.

So I log in.  The default desktop and icons remind me of how ugly Fedora used to look.  No offense to the art team that came up with those icons, but the theme Gnome/Fedora is using now is much better looking.

So, what does CentOS 5.2 come with?  In a delightful surprise, Firefox 3 Beta 5 is included by default!  So, one of the questions I set out to answer was whether someone could run CentOS as a safe version of Fedora.  People often complain that Fedora is so bleeding edge and they want something more stable.  People often point them to Debian or RHEL, but not as often to CentOS.  I think that’s a missed opportunity to keep them in the Red Hat ecosystem.  Also, it appears that just because you don’t have a bleeding edge distro it doesn’t mean you have to run extremely outdated software.  Afterall, Firefox 3 just came out this year!  While I’m sure that CentOS/RHEL are very conservative in general in their software packages, you can still get the latest Firefox, that great!   I have 44 updates - so we’ll see what version of Firefox I have after that.

Other packages included by default include  Open Office.org 2.3, The GIMP, Ekiga, Planner, Rhythmbox, Sound Juicer, and the default Gnome games.  Pup is the updater - as opposed to PackageKit in Fedora 9.  So I start updating.  Unlike Sabayon - it only took about 10 minutes.  It had installed a new kernel so I rebooted.

Now Firefox was at 3.0.2.  Open Office.org is still at 2.3.  I looked in the repos to see what was available.  Blender was not there.  Compiz is, surprisingly, available.  So you could have wobbly windows if you want, but no 3D modelling.

As I’ve mentioned throughout the article, I am very familiar with Fedora and I would say CentOS compares pretty well with Fedora.  I know I’ve only used it briefly, but I think I can recommend it for anyone who wants to have Red Hat technology, but thinks that Fedora moves too quickly and can’t afford RHEL.  The installation is pretty much exactly the same.  The packages you get in the end are roughly the same.  There are some things missing - such as Blender.  But perhaps you could download that RPM from somewhere else.  So, definitely check it out.  And, if you’re running a mission critical server - you really should be on CentOS/RHEL and NOT Fedora.

  

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Oct

31

Review: Sabayon 3.5 Pod

Category: Linux | 6 Comments

Since both Gentoo and Sabayon were included on this Linux Format DVD, I decided I would first try and install Gentoo and then Sabayon and compare how easy the installations were since Sabayon is a derivative distro from Gentoo.  As you know, I was unable to get a working installation from the LiveCD of Gentoo.  If this was the case for most people, then the fact that they will no longer produce one is a good riddance.  Sabayon, like most of the “modern” distros (or at least Ubuntu and Fedora), display a loading screen instead of the “ok” messages.

The Sabayon slogan unfrotunately reminds me a bit too much of the current presidential campaign in the USA.  I do, however, like the graphics - soft blues and elegant simplicity.  Here’s the default desktop on the LiveCD.

There are two things I don’t like here.  First of all, the mouse pointer is HUGE.  But second, I’m not a huge fan of distros radically changing the defaults in the desktops.  Xfce should look more like CDE than KDE.  Still, only minor issues.  On the positive side, unlike with Gentoo, the liveCD has built in audio players so I was able to test and confirm that audio should work as I have it set up in the virtual machine.   Here I test that the audio works by listening to the Severed Fifth intro.

The Sabayon LiveCD also does a better job of giving the prospective Linux user an idea of what programs they might use.  Included are GIMP, Audacious, Mplayer, RealPlayer 10, Firefox, Pidgin, Abiword and Gnumeric.  Ok, so let’s get installing and see if it’s easier.

The installation program is quite blue!

I thought it looked very familiar and today I found out the Sabayon project is using Anaconda (which is what Fedora uses for installs) so that’s why it looked so familier.  First step is to select my language (english).  Second step is the keyboard - us english.  Next I had to choose whether I wanted EEE PC Sabayon, Xfce, or basically just a commandline system.  I chose Xfce.

Then came package selections.  They appeared to be limited to what was included on the DVD because clicking on details didn’t allow me to select extra things.  I just left it with the defaults.  Next it was time to choose individual packages.  It was very unclear where the check-boxes were.  But if you clicked in the right place it gave you the option to remove packages.  I removed Compiz and left everything the same.  If you double-click on a package you get a very detailed description of the package.

Next was choosing which services to enable.  I left this at the defaults.

I left partitions at automatic partition.  Then came the grub installation screen and it was no more complicated than in other distros.  This was followed by the ethernet settings.  Again - it was pretty standard - not more complicated nor less complicated than Ubuntu or Fedora.  Then it was time to set the timezone and the users.  I like that root and the normal user are on one screen to help show the computer user that these are two separate accounts.

I love that, unlike with Gentoo it double-checks the user’s password.  Then the installation began.

Apparently, during the installation they show desktops of Sabayon users.

So the installation began…and finished about 20 minutes later.  Not bad!  So I reboot the VM.  It loads up that dreams we can believe in screen again.  And I end up at a very nice looking GDM login screen:

And I find myself at a desktop that looks exactly the same as before with exactly the same selection of programs.  And the sound and internet work!!

So, there you go, it’s easier to install than Gentoo and everything works after installation as well as it did in the LiveCD.  Now, I notice that I’m not getting any notices that my packages are out of date.  It is possible, of course, that my packages are not out of date.  But I find that hard to believe - after all, they probably started work on this magazine DVD 2 or more months ago.  Perhaps I need to first use the package manager.  So I launch the Spritz Package Manager.

Ok…so maybe I AM up to date?  On the repository page, I clicked refresh and that started downloading the repository database.  Perhaps I do need updates….I’ll find out in a few minutes.  I think, if it wasn’t going to happen automatically, it should have told me to do that when I logged in for the first time.  Overall, I really like the Spritz Package Manager.  It’s very well-polished.  I think the closest thing I’ve seen to this that’s this good would be Mandriva’s package management.  This looks nicer.  Now it started getting security advisories.  It earlier said it didn’t have any and I couldn’t believe that.  Now, this is more like it.  I have to update everything that’s installed.

Now, one place where it looses points vs Mandriva, Fedora with package-kit, and Ubuntu is in the categories of the packages.  This is where I would go to install packages by category:

It’s not hard at all to figure out what games-board means.  But it’s uglier and not quite as elegant as the rest of Sabayon.  I decide to install Blender to see how easy it is to do.  (not that I can actually expect for it to work well in a virtual machine)  It takes a little while to search through the packages.  And it finds 2.46.  It’s one revision behind, but then again Fedora likes to push the edge.  Ubuntu and FreeBSD are also not yet at 2.47.

I also decide to process all the updates.   Now it wasn’t 100% clear what to do, but I quickly figured it out.  All the packages I was going to install were put into a queue.  So I will click on process queue.

It was taking a while to download.  It grabbed a bunch of tbz2 files.  It looked like it was probably going to do like FreeBSD and then it was going to compile and install the files.  I’m off to bed (since I’m “live-blogging” this) and I’ll see what’s going on when I wake up.  When I woke up it was on package 87/179.  I’ll leave it downloading while I’m at work today.  Three hours later (I had to come home early for something) it was on 126.  8 hours later it’s still not done.  It’s on 127/179.  Does it only fetch packages if I’m watching?  Now it’s Tuesday and I started this on Sunday.  It’s on 160/179.  This is really, really slow…. I wonder if there’s a mirror list of faster mirrors and the default mirror just sucks.  Got home and 170/179.  I have a very fast broadband connection and usually a 500 MB file takes 30 minutes to and hour to download.  So I think it was probably a mirror issue.  It finished after a little while and then began installation.

Finally, on Wednesday, it finished.  That took waaaaay too long.  At least everything worked while that was happening.  However, since I installed it into virtualbox, it could be that it’s not getting enough processor power to build the packages quickly enough.  There were a lot of messages going by while packages were built letting me know that this package or that one needed some post-configuration like me changing a config file.  I wonder if there’s somewhere I can see that after installation is done.  Spritz then informed me that everything was done.  But then it became unresponsive.  I rebooted so I could get into the new kernel, xfce, etc

So I was now using Xfce 4.4.2.  Blender was installed and it surprisingly worked from within the VirtualBox!  Firefox was now 3.0.1.  So it appears to be just as up-to-date package-wise as all the other major distros - Fedora, Ubuntu, etc  Interestingly, Spritz now has a banner ad.  Well, if that’s how they pay the server bills, then that’s ok by me.  The icons were also slightly different.

So what’s the verdict?  On the one hand, Sabayon beat my first try at installing Gentoo via LiveCD.  But on the other hand, it took basically 3 days to update the few packages that were installed.  Again, that might just be a VM or mirror thing, but that definitely is horrible.  Second, ever since the packages finished installing I’ve been trying to load up spritz to see which versions of other programs are available, but spritz keeps freezing.  And when it hadn’t frozen and I attempted to update the sources, it crashed.  So I’m going to say that my final verdit is as follows:

Visual Appeal:  Great, inviting -  something about the background, bootup background and theme they’ve chosen just looks right

Ease of use (distro installation):  Easy as any of the easy-to-use distros - especially Fedora since it uses Anaconda

Ease of use (programs):  For running programs and all that it’s about as easy as Ubuntu.

Ease of use (initial configuration):  Pretty good.  Audio works and it even appears to have flash preinstalled.

Ease of use (package installation):  I’d have to say that Sabayon, while easier than Gentoo, is certainly not yet ready for primetime.  It’s not as easy to install programs as in Ubuntu or Fedora.  For the first time user, Synaptic and PackageKit are a LOT easier to use.  A lot of the choices in Spritz seemed odd or confusing to me so imagine someone who was told that Sabayon is easy enough for new users.  In the end, I could never get it to work again and it complained about needing to get a new version of entropy, but I couldn’t get it since the installer was b0rked.  I took a closer look at the error.  It’s an absurd catch-22.  When I try to download the repository I get a warning that I can’t do that because I haven’t downloaded the repository.  Then Spritz appears to lock up.    I have no idea if it’s doing stuff in the background.

In the end I’d say - first get used to Linux on Ubuntu, Mandriva, openSUSE, or Fedora.  After that, check out Debian.  Then you’re ready for Sabayon and it would probably be a good stepping-stone to trying out Gentoo, Slackware, and other more involved distros.

  

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