This is to cover my own personal experience, since it would be impossible to add all the details to the quick look article. Both Rob and I installed Sabayon 6.0 at the same time with the same x86_64_k disc (64-bit KDE install). PC specs in signature...
After some initial problems related to a temperamental DVD drive getting picky over media... the live disc was created. The disc went in, booted from the Live disc with music enabled (just to try it out). The Live disc provides a fully functional environment, everything was working, even Internet access, graphics and sound. However, what was immediately apparent was the somewhat random behaviour of the mouse and keyboard. At first I thought nothing of it, it was working for the most part... so it was off to the installer.
The Install went on a formatted 1TB Samsung F3 hard drive in case you want to know. The installer is simple enough, select country, keyboard style/regional settings and such... root password and main user account details. The only trouble came with the partitioner.
While I am a novice to Linux, I am not completely oblivious to some of its quirks. Remembering my previous Ubuntu installs and with some reminders from Rob, 3 partitions were created. The first being '/boot' - a 500MB ext4 partition for storing GRUB, etc, the bootloader. The second was an 8GB '/swap' - equivalent to windows pagefile. The remaining 900GB was then created as a Btrfs volume for the main OS itself.
A quick note on
Btrfs - this is the GPL version of SUN/Oracle's ZFS. This is the, to put it simply, super extensive file system built with redundancy and data integrity in mind. It has built in read/write checksum, live data compression, encryption, an integrated volume management system, much like RAID, and all kinds of other goodies. Yes, for some reason, I like reading up on file systems... mainly because I'm fed up with the technical limitations of FAT32 and NTFS... but I digress...
The rest of the install went along uneventful... rebooted and here I was in Sabayon 6.0. Then the troubles start. My hardware is not atypical - it's a high end system, yes, modern, yes, but no SCSI controllers, PCIe SSD, SPARC CPUs, fibre network or anything like that. So I logged in, keyboard and mouse working at the login screen.... I start to interact with the taskbar with the mouse and the woes begin...
I could left and right click on the taskbar, opening up menus, volume control, network, main menu, etc, but I could not interact with anything above the task bar. All the menus were greeted with blank mouse key presses. I plugged in a different mouse in a different USB slot and the same problem. The keyboard was at least responsive.... initially...
Navigating around through a GUI with a KB only was a trial of patience. Fortunately I managed to get chromium open, and low and behold, the mouse could interact with it. Opening tabs, scrolling the page, it was wondrous... but I had lost the ability to interact with the taskbar... reading up a little as to possible problems, I saw that KDE gestures could sometimes interfere... I set about disabling them. Not so fast...
Opening up the system settings and then navigating to gesture controls was simple enough. I tabbed through to the gesture controls to disable and - nothing. No space or enter commands would toggle the options. Tab too far and it would enter a text input window, which would record tab key presses, making me stuck. So I had to escape a few times... then after some experimenting with tabbing and arrow keys, I managed to get to the main gesture control, and space managed to turn it off... woohoo! Rebooted...
Same problem. Rob, with the patience of a saint, starts guiding me through a manual update of the display drivers (since I'm running an AMD card, not the most Linux friendly and could be the cause of the mysterious interaction problems). A couple reboots later and I still have problems.
So I open chromium again, looking for solutions with the system settings open, I try to do a search, but I can't interact with the search bar, I start typing and for some reason, the system settings selection is jumping all over the place, but the mouse will only interact with chromium. Work this out... the keyboard is stuck in system settings and the mouse is stuck in chromium... neither being able to switch. The GUI input focus was split and all over the place - by this time I was borderline going insane.
Rob then suggested I try switching to GNOME. The meta or full version wasn't available, so GNOME-light was installed instead. Some terminal entries and a reboot later, I switched the login mode to GNOME and it was a breath of fresh air, I could interact with menus - albeit ugly menus, but I could finally use the interface...
Until I couldn't. The relief was short lived as the madness took over with input modes locking down to specific apps and interface elements. I conceded defeat and went to bed.
Is it some random issue with X11-drivers? Do I have funky peripherals? Is the AMD driver to blame? I have no idea... So I'm off to give Pinguy a go - maybe I'll have better luck.
----- Edit -----
Nope, no luck there, this is truly frustrating. Even with Pinguy OS Live disc used, I get the same input issues. It's worth pointing out that Sabayon and Pinguy are very different, Pinguy is based on Mint, which is based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debian, Sabayon is based on Gentoo. So, this is either a Motherboard issue, P67/chipset issue... or a conflict with X/xorg/X11 with one of the above. The reason for X being a possible problem comes down to both KDE and GNOME using it as the base... though I'm uncertain of versions...
Plenty of reading going on here atm...
