TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

Sabayon has been an interesting distribution in the past. Their emphasis on including games, 3D drivers, and multimedia support out of the box has endeared them to me.

However I've never actually chosen to use the distribution regularly, opting instead to play with the live games from time to time.

While searching for a different kind of distribution to throw on Rig 4, Sabayon 3.5 came up. Given my pleasant past experiences I decided to give it a try.

Install:

The DVD boots up to a live environment by default that will load Nvidia drivers if you have the hardware and give you the option whether or not to turn on desktop effects. You also have several other choices, including two games. This is a staple of Sabayon.

Did I mention the Live CD has music? This time I recognized the track. It was "Meant to Be" by Rob Costlow, a contemporary pianist I have on my iPod.

I guess it goes with the "Dreams we can believe in" theme they seem to be using for this release. For those interested, it's part of the album "Woods of Chaos." But that's enough product placement.

I chose KDE as my default desktop and was happy when it turned out to be good old stable 3.5.9. It's good to know not everyone has jumped on the 4.0 bandwagon.

I browsed the list of package groups it was going to install and set my services to be enabled (or in my case disabled) at boot.

After configuring my users and root password I was off. The install took a while.

After the reboot, I was able to set up my wireless internet (thank you Intel). The first thing I did was let the update program look for updates. It found quite a few, and before I could install some of them it asked me to read their licensing agreements.

The package manager for Sabayon is a unique one. It's called Spritz, and from what I gather it's a graphical front-end to equo, the Sabayon package management system.

The update process took considerably longer than I expected because the updater downloaded and then compiled every update locally. This can give you a marginal performance boost, but it takes a long time to complete.

One small annoyance I ran into while updating was the update notifier. It would pop up a balloon every time an update finished telling me how many updates were still left. I could have done without that.

I should note that Nvidia drivers were installed by default, and the games included (such as Nexuiz) worked fine. MP3/WMV and Flash were also installed and worked as expected.

Software Selection:

Sabayon is a kitchen sink distribution, and it has always offered more in the way of games than most others. Nexuiz, Sauerbraten, Battle for Wesnoth, and Second Life were installed by default.

Also included were Picasa and Google Earth, OpenOffice, Firefox, Pidgin, GIMP, Inkscape and FileZilla.

I was a little surprised at some of the selections in the Multimedia menu: Amarok, Audacious, dvd::rip, Ardour2, Elisa Media Center, and some applications for using LightScribe.

GCC and Java were included, but the development tools I saw mostly covered we development, such as Quanta Plus. Surprisingly, KDevelop was not installed.

All this extra software is neat and all, but there were some things I didn't need, such as Picasa. I delved into Spritz to see if I could just remove it that way.

I saw no obvious way to remove a program, so I tried using the command line. Equo errored out, telling me that another instance was already running.

At this point I gave up. Spritz fails a basic usability test. How hard would it be to add a "REMOVE" button? I was disappointed because the tool shows promise. It even had some clever remarks in the dialogs.

Conclusion:

Once again I'm left with the feeling that although Sabayon is a very fun Live environment to carry around and fire up when I'm bored, it's just not something I can see myself using on a daily basis.

With a little work on their package management system I think Sabayon could have a nice alternative to RPM and DEB-based distributions. It's just not there yet.