Sorry for the interruption but I was out of town for most of the holiday (we left the 26th for Chicago, but thats a whole post on its own!). I did however, want to brag about some of the Christmas Gifts that blessed our house this season though.

Amy’s big gift this year is to have the Master Bath and Bedroom repainted. When we bought the house from her parents, we inherited the DEEP red color of the bath and bed room. Its a dark red (think maroon) that is hard to match colors with. Now we’re going for a lighter, beachier look and are painting them Beachnut (its a lowes color). The master bath is done (Amy found some Votive candle holders at a store in Nashville), next on to the bedroom!

Grace had a very Hannah Montanna Christmas. She got a Hannah Montanna Guitar Game (like Guitar Hero) that plugs in to the tv, a Hannah Costume, and doll. Its pretty cool and she likes pretending to be a rockstar. Maybe someday. I like playing her game (since I haven’t bought Guitar HEro World Tour yet) and she’s getting better at it.

Mose got a Trampoline. One of her favorite things to do is jump. We’d wake on Saturday mornings to the heavy thud of emma jumping up and down in our door way. Now she can do it all she wants and it doesn’t make the house shake. Its pretty cool and Grace and Emma take turns on it. Amy wanted to try it out, but its for people under 80 pounds (and neither of us meet that requirement!

The girls also got some tinkertoys, and some other little odds and ends that they like to play with, but the coolest by far is my Ultimate Wall-E Robot.

We saw the movie in the theaters and we’re big fans (mose loves him). We had seen the Ultimate Wall-e at the Disney Store but we weren’t going to get him because of the price tag. Needless to say, Santa found him on Sale and he was wrapped and under the tree for me on Christmas morning. He has fun dancing, chasing the dogs around and just exploring on his own. If you haven’t seen one yet, I’ll work on some video and see if I can get anything posted. Its pretty cool though and the way he can respond to voice commands or find his own way around the room is fairly smooth.

Was there one gift that you prized more than the others??

I finally decided to try out linux on the laptop again, a project that was once a daunting task due to the wireless networking chip HP decided to use in this box. I was pleasantly surprised when i booted the Sabayon linux live disc in and on boot it found my network card and video card and had everything setup waiting for a key to access the network. Pretty smooth, and I did like the beryl features too, so I went ahead and installed it to the laptop, nuking the windows install I had labored so long to make almost perfect.

Installing sabayon was easy and I was actually able to install it on the laptop while I was driving home… as once you enter some key information, it does its thing until you’re ready to reboot. By the time I had picked the girls up from day care and gotten them all inside the house, the system was ready to reboot.

The machine boots about as fast as it does in windows, which is ok, I don’t need speed on boot (as I very rarely turn the system off) and the default WM is KDE with beryl. Which is ok too, I guess. I’ve always been somewhat of a Gnome fan, however, the recent switch of slackware going KDE only and the more recent stuff with Linus and the Gnome team left me with questions. I’ve found, in the week that I’ve been using it, its very similar to Windows in the way it does things and handles menus, and the new kicker is cool too.

Sabayon is not a distribution for those who like to go minimal. It is a Gentoo Stage 3 install on Steroids, and it comes with several versions of software that do the same thing (something like 6 videos players?!?!?!) however, if you have a beefy system and want something that looks classy, then its a good fit. I have had some problems with some of the software not playing nicely, firefox for one, which was stable as anything on the windows install has crashed on me several times when it comes up against embedded media that it can’t handle (I admit, this might not be a fault of Sabayon so much as firefox) and the lack of a really decent MS Exchange friendly mail client (yea, there’s evolution, but come on…..) has led me to throw together a windows xp box to use on my desktop for email (the company uses exchange…) and browsing trouble sites…

Over all, the distro is good, and probably stable enough for the average user, the polish is there, I would say that sabayon just needs to work on the stuff under the hood for the next major release. 3.3 is due out some time with in the next month or so. Below is a video of my desktop in action…. it didn’t come out as good as I wanted, but I think its not bad for a first time….

Linuxtracker.org is pleased to announce the availability of x86 64-lazydragon-linux-v2 on the linuxtracker bittorrent network. For faster downloads, more accurate statistics and to see all of the available torrents, please visit http://linuxtracker.org. This is the first release of the new LazyDragon-V2 base system for AMD64 CPU’s .

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