Quick Look at VectorLinux 7.0 Final

Around two weeks ago, on 28th November, VectorLinux 7.0 was finally released after two years of work, or, as the developers put it in the release announcement, "nearly two years of blood, sweat and tears". We don't want to be disrespectful then. You can get a brief overview of features for the standard edition here and here. I've previously looked at RC2 in a longer review over on Muktware, so this is more meant as an addendum.

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.

Salix Xfce 13.37-beta2 - first impressions and screenshots

On 05/04 the second beta of the Salix main Xfce version was made available, and being one of my favorite distributions I just had to give it a quick spin and opted for a basic install. First impressions are excellent.  Things haven't changed much, and except a lovely fresh new wallpaper and login screen 13.37 looks exactly like the previous two. Good for when you actually want to get down to business and not relearn the interface every few months.

Quick Look at Fedora-inspired Fusion Linux 14 - Mini Review

It seems like the same few blogs review the same distributions, but I've got a good excuse. Fedora 14 KDE finally got the better of me, it felt slow and everything generally took ages to open up, the menu was worse than the old days of Windows fade in menus (remember those?) and I removed it from my drive. I suppose this really is the last chance I gave it, KDE 4 is just not for me. Not to say that Gnome is, but at least it's more responsive.

Quick Look at Scientific Linux 6.0 Alpha

I was meaning to write this yesterday and before you know, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 final is out. But that doesn't mean we can't post a quick look at this one.
As most of you will know, Scientific Linux is a free clone of RHEL compiled from the original source rpm's, and with the upstream branding removed. As such it is almost identical to the Red Hat product, but in contrast to the CentOS project the SL team are adding and tweaking a few packages to make it better suit their needs.

Sabayon 5.3 Xfce & LXDE - a few impressions

First of all let me say this is not intended to be a full review of Sabayon Linux. Sabayon is well known and had its fair share of reviews already, the most recent one I am aware of being very thorough and can be read here. This is more like a quick look and impressions of how the light weight desktop environments do on Sabayon SpinBase.

First look at Unity Linux 2010.1 - Mini Review

Unity Linux had their first release on 09/07/2010 after around 1.5 years of development. The project was created in 2009 by former developers from the PClinuxOS (hereafter abbreviated PCLOS) community. [Some contentious and unneccessary stuff snipped ...] One of them was KDulcimer who at the time had his own project TinyMe based on PCLOS, which according to the website started in 2006. His distribution would in the future be based on Unity Linux. So much for how the two are intertwined.