Archive for August 2011

Sabayon 6 Roundup - Fluxbox and XBMC

Having looked at the two main editions of Gnome x86 and KDE x64 I've come to the conclusion, that the best way to use Sabayon 6 on the desktop is... to log into Fluxbox. When talking about the installer I briefly mentioned that it launches in a Fluxbox environment if you choose install directly from the boot menu, which it falls back into if things go wrong, and believe me they do.

Quick Look at Sabayon 6 Continued (KDE)

To give Sabayon a fair shake and with the aim of comparing it to recent releases of other KDE  distributions I also downloaded the amd64 image for the KDE 4 edition, which comes in at a hefty 2.13 GB, with a few surprising results (torrent here). First of all, boot options, boot loader background and splash, artwork and overall style and feel is very similar to the GNOME edition which makes for a good coherent theme across all spins.

Quick Look at Sabayon 6 (GNOME)

Earlier this year we had a poll regarding which distributions to review, and Sabayon received enough interest so here we are. Besides, Sabayon Linux is always fun to try, to see which start up music and themes they come up with this time, and to play with the media center included. I also find the dark blue themes employed in recent versions quite appealing.

Quick Look at Bodhi Linux 1.1.0

A lot has been written about Bodhi Linux in its short existence. Bodhi appeared out of nowhere not even a year ago it seems and quickly gained followers aplenty. Usually there's a good reason for something like this. So much has been written in such little amount of time, I'm not going to go into all the aspects of this little distro, for example that Bodhi means Enlightenment, a nice word play on the default desktop environment of choice E17, just a quick look.

Trying the CompTIA Network+ 2009 Prepkit from uCertify

I've recently been approached to review one or more of this vendor's training and so-called PrepKits, and having obtained the CompTIA Network+ 2009 certification myself thought this would be a good start, as this is making it possible to compare with other solutions and methods of learning.

Zenwalk 7.0 Live - Teaching tool and installable live system

This is a repost of the article on OStatic. What really annoyed me was that the editor cut off the top panel in the screenshot and did not even respond to email requests to rectify this. Perhaps he confused it with a Virtualbox window, no idea, but this just shows a high degree of incompetence. Everybody knows Xfce comes with a top panel by default, right?

Did GNOME Shell Miss the Mark?

Having played with a couple of tablets over the last week it occurred to me that these are the sort of devices the GNOME 3 Shell is said to be intended to run on, a reasonable assumption when looking at the design. However, the current breed of tablets PC's come with their own interfaces already, and they seem rather streamlined and efficient at what they're doing. Android tablets, HP webOS, the Blackberry Playbook and of course the iPad all have rather good interfaces in my view that are more than up to the job they're intended for, and probably superior to the Shell because they have been designed with just that one purpose in mind.