Sabayon 8

Sabayon is an Italian linux distribution amed after an Italian dessert, zabaione. Sabayon is based on Gentoo linux and therefore it is a rolling release. Sabayon believes in out of the box philosophy and works silky smooth. Lets have look around it

Sabyon supports several cpu architectures and is available in every desktop environment and by the way there is a gamming edition though.

The package management is done through either portege(inherited from gentoo) and Entropy . Entropy is very nice package manager . The GUI version is called Rigo which is not so great its like add and remove software centre.

All in all, Sabayon works out of the box wine is preinstalled for your windows apps and mp3 works dandy. It works without any lag. So, it is powerful distribution which is able to satisfy most of the needs so its recomended to everyone esp. the XFCE edition.

Open your wings with Flightgear

Flight gear is an open source flight simulator. You can actually fly different kinds of aircraft starting from Airbus A380 to Wright Flyer.

The system requirments are a 2-3ghz cpu, a OpenGl 2.1 compatible card with 1gb memory, 1-2 gb ram and 8-10 gb harddisk space

The latest version is 2.6 . You can fly small gliders, commercial airliners, warbirds, helicopters, fighters, fictional planes, and airships , there is also an Nimitz class aircraft carrier.

In my opinion its an wonderful application/game and is available for Linux, BSD, MAC and Windows.

Overview: Fedora 17 beta

Fedora as all of you know is community project sponsered by Red Hat. The last stable release was 16 verne it was extremely stable. The downside of the last release is gnome 3.2 . Gnome 3.2 requires 3D acceleration. Experienced users do not like the interface. Now with latest gnome 3.4 fedora has tried to address those issuses now there is no need of 3D acceleration. Gnome 3.4 user experience is better than 3.2.The Ext4 now supports upto 16TB. Awaiting for the final release.

Mageia 2

Mageia is an awesome linux distribution. Mageia 2 have been released. Mageia is a fork of Mandriva 2010 since then the devlopers of Mageia put a lot of hardwork to put up this release. Mageia is currently available in KDE, GNOME, LXDE, XFCE Razor-qt and E17 other lightweight window mangers such as IceWM, WindowMaker etc are also available.

The installation process is bit difficult but not a great deal. There is good selection of software available by defalt. The GUI package manager is rpmdrake. There are three sets of repositrys availavble ::
Core: For free software and drivers
Non free: This includes nonfree proprietary drivers and free of charge proprietary software this is not enabled by default
Tainted: The Tainted repository includes packages released under a free license. The main criteria for placing packages in this repository is that they may infringe on patents and copyright laws in some countries, this repo is also not enabled by default.

Mageia 2 is bit laggy to run but all in all its very nice operting system to try out for everyone.

LINUX MINT 13 MAYA

Linux mint 13 codenamed maya has been released. Linux mint as all of you know is based on ubuntu and maya is no exception it is based on ubuntu 12.04 precise pangolin which was released last month. Linux Mint 13 will also be long term release and will be supported till april 2017.

The installation process is easy but took a little long than ubuntu. The login screen is MDM which is based on GDM 2.20 and its very functional and linux mint team says it is the best display manager available. Now for desktop environment you have two options Mate and Cinnamon.

The Mate desktop is fork of gnome 2. Mate picked up things where gnome 2 left and is evolving since then and there is mintmenu which is the best menu in my opinion, which was absent in last release. Mate is currently 1.2 the software available with mate is of gtk and is forked and renamed. As linux mint team says Mate is the best desktop environment available.

Cinnamon is based on gnome 3 and uses gtk3 libraries. Cinnamon is currently at 1.4 and is under heavy devlopment. Cinnamon has many functionalites like gnome2 in which gnome3 falls short. Cinnamon can be easily be tweaked using cinnamon settings. As far the look and feel its looks very modern with mint -z dark theme. The scale and expo effects are quite smooth and handy. The menu is functional and you can actually drop drag icons here and there but, I am little bit dissapointed because its not anything like mintmenu in mate.

The software centre is also functional and there is synaptic . The software available are essentially the same that of ubuntu. The mint is absolutly stable but, it takes a while to startup ; its not a major issue. Otherwise, it runs silky smooth.

Mint has already topped the distrowatch ranking. Cinnamon and Mate is not as functional as unity in ubuntu but with active devlopment I am sure mint will outsmart unity. Its definately worth checking and good replacement for proprietary software esp. Mikros0ft windeos .