So, I’d been interested in what the new Beryl visuals could do for the linux workstation – but didn’t really enjoy all the mucking around trying to get them working. When I saw that Sabayon Linux was out and saw some of the things that it could do – I thought that I’d give it a try.
A couple people have said “Why do you want to choke down a linux workstation/laptop with all that silly GUI eye-candy” but I’m kind of the opinion that something like a Core 2 Duo processor with ample memory should be able to handle that stuff. Either that, or it’s not written well. After all – Vista manages to pull off it’s Aero tricks without any noticeable lag on this platform.
So, on to the good, bad, and ugly.
I tried it on my Thinkpad. The live DVD booted without issue. It was a little slow (about ten minutes until totally up) but that’s what you get from loading from a DVD. I was impressed that it recognized the ATI Mobility Radeon in the laptop, and more that it suggested I run XGL on it – and finally that it worked. Pretty graphics, 3-d cubes, all that – and it was fast! It didn’t recognize the wireless adapter – but that didn’t surprise me, since no other Linux distro has either.
So – on to running the installer. The install option is an icon directly on the desktop of the LiveDVD distro. I clicked it, ran through a couple regional options, partitioning choices – and then had got an python error in the installer. Tried again, no luck. Rebooted, tried again – still no luck. Ultimately I ran the graphical install directly from the boot choices and it continued without error.
It was a slow install – probably 45 minutes. But then it was done, system booted, and I was looking at something like the LiveDVD screen. Problem was – it didn’t want to accept the 3d XGL option. i tried different things for a while, and eventually it worked. Then it stopped accepting any keyboard input. So, I rebooted it – only to find that it reloaded every application that I had ever opened during the initial test on my after boot. And this time – even tho I selected the XGL options – it refused to load them. I’d go back to the screen to find that it had reverted back to ‘no acceleration’. After screwing around for a while – then ending back again at the ‘not accepting keyboard input’ I gave up.
It seems like a nice start, a good beta – but I’d guess I needs a couple years work before it’s ready for prime time.