The Linux Experiment

A new episode of the Listener Feedback podcast has been released. This episode features the extremely talented acoustic rock artist Josh Woodward with his album Dirty Wings. Download it here.

A new episode of the Listener Feedback podcast has been released. This episode features the extremely talented one-man rock band Slim with his album Interstate Medicine. Download it here.

I have been running Sabayon Linux (Xfce) for the past couple of months and figured I would throw a post up on here describing my experience with it.

Reasons for Running

The reason I tried Sabayon in the first place is because I was curious what it would be like to run a rolling release distribution (that is a distribution that you install once and just updates forever with no need to re-install). After doing some research I discovered a number of possible candidates but quick narrowed it down based on the following reasons:

• Linux Mint Debian Edition – this is an excellent distribution for many people but for whatever reason every time I update it on my hardware it breaks. Sadly this was not an option.
• Gentoo – I had previously been running Gentoo and while it is technically a rolling release I never bothered to update it because it just took too long to re-compile everything.
• Arch Linux – Sort of like Gentoo but with binary packages, I turned this one down because it still required a lot of configuration to get up and running.
• Sabayon Linux – based on Gentoo but with everything pre-compiled for you. Also takes the ‘just works’ approach by including all of the proprietary and closed source  codecs, drivers and programs you could possibly want.

Experience running Sabayon

Sabayon seems to take a change-little approach to packaging applications and the desktop environment. What do I mean by this? Simply that if you install the GNOME, KDE or Xfce versions you will get them how the developers intended – there are very few after-market modifications done by the Sabayon team. That’s not necessarily a bad thing however, because as updates are made upstream you will receive them very quickly thereafter.

This distribution does live up to its promise with the codecs and drivers. My normally troublesome hardware has given me absolutely zero issues running Sabayon which has been a very nice change compared to some other, more popular distributions (*cough* Linux Mint *cough*). My only problem with Sabayon stems from Entropy (their application installer) being very slow compared to some other such implementations (apt, yum, etc). This is especially apparent during the weekly system wide updates which can result in many, many package updates.

Final Thoughts

For anyone looking for a down to basics, Ubuntu-like (in terms of ease of install and use), rolling release distribution I would highly recommend Sabayon. For someone looking for something a bit more polished or extremely user friendly, perhaps you should look elsewhere. That’s not to say that Sabayon is hard to use, just that other distributions might specialize in user friendliness.

A new episode of the Listener Feedback podcast has been released. On this episode it is the international internet supergroup Tryad with their album Listen. Check it out here.

A new episode of the Listener Feedback podcast has been released. On this episode it is the French band Drunksouls with their album On verra plus tard. Check it out here.

It’s that time again. Like before I’ve decided to re-run my previous tests this time using the following distributions:

• Debian 6.0 (GNOME)
• Kubuntu 11.10 (KDE)
• Linux Mint 12 (GNOME)
• Linux Mint 201109 LXDE (GNOME)
• Mandriva 2011 (KDE)
• OpenSUSE 12.1 (GNOME)
• OpenSUSE 12.1 (KDE)
• Sabayon 8 (GNOME)
• Sabayon 8 (KDE)
• Sabayon 8 (Xfce)
• Ubuntu 11.10 (Unity)
• Ubuntu 12.04 Beta 2 (Unity)
• Xubuntu 11.10 (Xfce)

I will be testing all of this within VirtualBox on ‘machines’ with the following specifications:

• Total RAM: 512MB
• Hard drive: 8GB
• CPU type: x86 with PAE/NX
• Graphics: 3D Acceleration enabled

The tests were all done using VirtualBox 4.1.0 on Windows 7, and I did not install VirtualBox tools (although some distributions may have shipped with them). I also left the screen resolution at the default (whatever the distribution chose) and accepted the installation defaults. All tests were run between April 2nd, 2012 and April 9th, 2012 so your results may not be identical.

Results

Following in the tradition of my previous posts I have once again gone through the effort to bring you nothing but the most state of the art in picture graphs for your enjoyment.

Things to know before looking at the graphs

First off if your distribution of choice didn’t appear in the list above its probably not reasonably possible to installed (i.e. Fedora 16 which requires 768MB of RAM) or I didn’t feel it was mainstream enough (pretty much anything with LXDE). Secondly there may be some distributions that don’t appear on all of the graphs, for example Mandriva. In the case of Mandriva the distribution would not allow me to successfully install the updates and so I only have its first boot RAM usage available. Finally when I tested Debian I was unable to test before / after applying updates because it seemed to have applied the updates during install. As always feel free to run your own tests.

First boot memory (RAM) usage

This test was measured on the first startup after finishing a fresh install.

Memory (RAM) usage after updates

This test was performed after all updates were installed and a reboot was performed.

Memory (RAM) usage change after updates

The net growth or decline in RAM usage after applying all of the updates.

Install size after updates

The hard drive space used by the distribution after applying all of the updates.

Conclusion

As before I’m going to leave you to drawing your own conclusions.

Just a quick update to let you know that the second episode of the Listener Feedback podcast has been released. The artist on this episode is Blackwell with his album Un4givable. Check it out here.

I came across this neat script somewhere on the internet while trying to batch convert a folder full of FLAC files to mp3 files. Hopefully it will help somebody else:

for file in *.flac; do flac -cd “$file” | lame -b 320 -h – “${file%.flac}.mp3″; done

A fellow Linux Experiment Guinea Pig and I decided that we would start a new podcast showcasing some of the very best (and possibly worst) royalty free and creative commons music available. We’ve devised a short-format creation, so you don’t get bored, that aims to explore a new artist/album combination with each episode. In the podcast we share our thoughts, praise and criticism of each work and also feature a few songs in order to give you a taste of what to expect on the full album.

Check out the podcast over at www.listenerfeedback.net where you can listen to the show, download the episode’s featured album, leave us a comment or make a suggestion as to what we should listen to next. I hope you enjoy.

Well it’s been a couple of months now since the start of Experiment 2.0 and I’ve had plenty of time to learn about Gentoo, see its strengths and… sit waiting through its weaknesses. I don’t think Gentoo is as bad as everyone makes it out to be, in fact, compared to some other distributions out there, Gentoo doesn’t look bad at all.

Now that the experiment is approaching its end I figured it would be a good time to do a quick post about my experiences running Gentoo as a day-to-day desktop machine.

Strengths

Gentoo is exactly what you want it to be, nothing more. Sure there are special meta-packages that make it easy to install things such as the KDE desktop, but the real key is that you don’t need to install anything that you don’t want to. As a result Gentoo is fast. My startup time is about 10-20 seconds and, if I had the inclination to do so, could be trimmed down even further through optimization.

Packages are also compiled with your own set of custom options and flags so you get exactly what you need, optimized for your exact hardware. Being a more advanced (see expert) oriented distribution it will also teach you quite a bit about Linux and software configuration as a whole.

Weaknesses

Sadly Gentoo is not without its faults. As mentioned above Gentoo can be whatever you want it to be. The major problem with this strength in practice is that the average desktop user just wants a desktop that works. When it takes days of configuration and compilation just to get the most basic of programs installed it can be a major deterrent to the vast majority of users.

Speaking of compiling programs, I find this aspect of Gentoo interesting from a theoretical perspective but I honestly have a hard time believing that it makes enough of a difference to make it worth sitting through the hours days of compiling it takes just to get some things installed. Its so bad that I actually haven’t bothered to re-sync and update my whole system in over 50 days for fear that it would take forever to re-compile and re-install all of the updated programs and libraries.

Worse yet even when I do have programs installed they don’t always play nicely with one another. Gentoo offers a package manager, portage, but it still fails at some dependency resolution – often times making you choose between uninstalling previous programs just to install the new one or to not install the new one at all. Another example of things being more complicated than they should be is my system sound. Even though I have pulseaudio installed and configured my system refuses to play audio from more than one program at a time. These are just a few examples of problems I wouldn’t have to deal with on another distribution.

-Sigh-

Well, it’s been interesting but I will not be sticking with Gentoo once this experiment is over. There are just too many little things that make this more of an educational experience than a real day-to-day desktop. While I certainly have learned a lot during this version of the experiment, at the end of the day I’d rather things just work right the first time.