Some new software

A few software projects which I have been (and probably still am) a heavy user of have released their new versions in the last few days.

The first is eclipse with their yearly release, the good things that I quickly saw was the release of the 64bit linux version as part of their download options. The bad includes no svn support built-in, and the fact that the product keep on stumbling with the built in update (RC4 crashed after an attempt to upgrade to release).

The second project releasing (finally!) is gentoo releasing 2008.0 a few month later than expected, nothing really new in this release (but this should probably be the case of all releases in gentoo) so I updated my profiles and did a quick 'emerge --newuse -uDv world' and there it is. I hope that the gentoo project will wake up from its recent hibernation.

Those open source projects are both great - allowing one to confide and rely on them - keep it up!

Working on the edge

Got myself a new computer (amd x2 4800, 6GB memory) and decided to test a new distribution of Linux. For a very long time I have been a fan of gentoo which has been serving me for the last few years without needing to reinstall.

However, walking on the edge means that I would like to test some new stuff once in a while and as gentoo is a playground I already know I have decided to try and check its derivative - sabayon linux.

The LiveDVD was very promising, bunch of stuff I didn't knew or never bothered to configure - mainly compiz which worked without a hitch on the 780 based motherboard.

Installation worked well - chose ext4 as a partition (hope not to regret it soon). Now something like 230+ packages need update. Almost everything seems to be installed - so this is probably a bloatware OS although compiz didn't auto-start.

I am now going to install eclipse and my development environment and will give this distro its chance, probably be back to gentoo soon ;)