Out of the Linux installs

....that I've done in the last couple of weeks: Fedora 12, Ubuntu Studio and Sabayon, as an OS I'd want to use on a daily basis, I'm still a fan of Sabayon.

Unfortunately when it installed GRUB onto the bootable drive that already contained Fedora it failed to recognise Fedora being there, and has prevented me booting that OS too. Dual-booters beware - it doesn't seem to have an auto-detect mode, which is a little odd.

One of the slightly more bizarre things, presumably because it's free (as in non-proprietary): Fedora didn't recognise my Nvidia graphics card and therefore didn't install drivers. Having said that, Fedora fonts were a long was ahead of Ubuntu fonts for clarity, even if they are a little odd, but was still less good than Sabayon. It also told me that it didn't recognise my sound card, which is bizzare, since it's a vanilla Soundblaster PCI card.

Fedora and Sabayon were quite fast too: not blazing quick, but not much slower than XP on this machine. However the real test was DVD playback. I never had the chance to test it with Fedora, but with Sabayon it was as good as a winbox. The dragon player is a bit sparse on controls, but it also comes with VLC loaded, so theoretically there's no reason not to use that if it's your preferred player.

In the hope of getting Ubuntu studio up and running today I ran the various tests available, including 90min worth of memory tests (boy, does that RAM get hot when it's being worked hard). Verified the disc - all fine. Everything passed, so I went on to try another install - to no avail - it's failing toward the end of installing packages. Installation is also REALLY slow - at least 1 hour, compared to around 40min Fedora and 35min Sabayon (S is a fair bit smaller) - and because it requires input several times during install it's not a walk-away job. I may resort to 8.04, just to give it a spin.

So if you have a machine that's a couple of years old and fancy a change, I'd certainly recommend Sabayon 5 as an interesting alternative to M$ and Apple.