TechTalk » Sabayon

Back to Sabayon

Techie — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 10:24:51 +0000

Even though I’ve been reasonably happy with my PCLinux OS install, I decided to try one more time to get Sabayon configured properly on my PC and this time, I finally got everything set up the right way - yea me! For those following along in the book, this was a full DVD install and I set KDE as the default desktop but load Gnome as well. Most of the time, I use K applications but there are a few Gnome-based apps that I like as well, such as the Evolution groupware suite.

Here’s a basic rundown of some of the apps that I’m finding the mos useful:

Word processing - OpenOffice Writer (since it handles Word docs so well)
Email - Evolution
FTP - FileZilla
Photo Editing - GIMP
Audio Editing - Audacity

In order to make things as easy as possible, I still have to import my TrueType fonts, but that’s easy enough to accomplish.

Updates

Techie — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 11:54:59 +0000

Much as I like the way Sabayon looks and, for the most part, how it acts, I have not been able to get printing functions working under Sabayon, so it’s become rather frustrating. Just for grins, I took a look at the version of Mandriva 2007 runnign on the old dual boot machine and set up printing there with no problem at all. Ditto for the install of Ubuntu on this machine. When I get back in this afternoon, I think I’ll try the Mandriva install on this one and see how it works. I had some issues with it initially on this machine due to the wireless but since I have the eth0 running now with a direct cable to this machine, I will probably not experience the same problems I had earlier.

Working without windows…

Techie — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 22:34:24 +0000

The new theme around our house is learning to operate computers without using Microsoft Windows. Quite a few years ago, I set up a machine here with a dual boot of Mandrake 8 and Windows and recently updated the linux portion on that machine. The bigger challenge however was to take my new machine and set it up to work effectlively without resorting to Windows at all.

So far, things are working out fairly well, though there is always a learning curve involved. My original intention was to load one of the linux distros with Gnome as the default desktop, but after mucking around with several of the more popular packages, none of them really looked the way I wanted - in particular, the fonts looked lousy on webpages and within applications. Mostly this is due to the fact that my widescreen monitor has a 1440 by 900 resolution and none of the distros seemed to handle it very well. The exception to that was Sabayon, which has KDE as a default desktop instead of Gnome. At this point, I don’t know how it will look with Gnome as I have installed the full DVD version yet and the mini-version only includes KDE.