fifteen year-old upstart Linux is the programming geek's idea of an operating system. freely available for download, installation and distribution, since its inception in the early 1990s, Linux's popularity has skyrocketed. One could say, Linux's story is the computing world's version of rags to riches. yet, its road to world dominance has hit a bit of a snag, it remains far from being a viable desktop alternative for the everyman.
The world has embraced the penguin. there is no doubt that much of the Internet's infrastructure uses Linux boxes. Enterprise and backrooms of companies everywhere are on Linux. If there was any doubt of the power and capability of Linux, one just has to look at the prestigious list of the Top 500 supercomputers in the world, where Linux is the obvious choice of scientists and researchers everywhere.
in spite of all this, Linux has not breached the desktop. is it because linux has had the reputation of being bland?
Sabayon Linux is one of many linux distributions that is getting eye candy. This video isn't my desktop. i picked it up off youTube to feature the beauty that is sabayon linux.
I've just finished reinstalling my linux box and moved from gentoo to sabayon, the latter is based on the former, much like ubuntu is based on debian. Sabayon Linux has one thing going for it: sabayon runs beryl out of the box.
So whats the big deal? Getting Beryl to run is more of a hit and miss mission. I should know, the past month has been dedicated to getting beryl to run on my gentoo-driven amd64 box. at one point, I was so desperate that i even reformatted the drive and installed ubuntu 7 (feisty) just to get it to work. The farthest i've reach using gentoo had been to get linux to run 3d rendering on my ati 9250 video card.
Sabayon solved my need. it ran aiglx right off the livecd installation. in fact it was the first thing it asked going through the installation. though i've had problems getting it to connect to my dsl modem (my linux box is the router which connects my internal network to the internet). it took a bit of work, and a bit of a hack via the good old gentoo installer: i chrooted to my installed sabayon and updated its rp-pppoe setup. it was the only way to make it happen.
Sabayon, Ubuntu Feisty are just some of the distros that give linux the eye candy and hopefully will attract the attention of people. Yet i must say this: Linux has a long way to go before it can be an excellent Desktop box. More on that for my next post.
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