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