OSMC on the Raspberry Pi

Hot on the heels of LibreELEC follows a test of OSMC. The nice thing about this little board is that you can have as many operating systems as you like and just swap them out as easy as loading another Micro SD. So your device can go from media center to OpenWRT router in a flash, for example. And because they are tiny you can always have a whole collection of them handy for the various roles the Pi can perform.

LibreELEC on the Raspberry Pi

Whether you like watching streaming media from the internetz or just want a unified interface that looks good, is skinnable and can be adjusted to your needs to watch movies from a home server or from local drive, look at your photo collection or listen to music, then chances are you want a media center. Not sure if Windows XP Media Center Edition made the idea popular or if it was the advent of cheap broadband that made it viable - probably both.

Inspecting the Gentoo 12.0 Live DVD

Following a recent request I downloaded the Gentoo 12.0 Live DVD for a test drive. I tried Gentoo many years ago but gave up after a few hours due to the time involved, and my knowledge back then was a lot more rudimentary than today. Gentoo is a source distribution that is supposed to be configured and compiled from stage 2 or stage 3 tarballs, although images are available that allow you to cheat and skip the early part of kernel compilation etc. via minimal install images.

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.