/home/endperform   Rants, rambles and technobabble

Someone had asked me if I was going to review Sabayon Linux, so without further delay, here’s my review.

Installation
I’ll jump right in with installation. The download was a LiveDVD ISO which when I booted it up put me into a KDE environment, complete with working Nvidia driver and game demos. Right off the bat, I noticed there were a lot of apps loaded out (more on that later). I played around a bit with the live environment and decided to go ahead and fire up the installer by double-clicking the icon on the desktop.

The installer is based off of the graphical installer found in Fedora and Red Hat. A couple of clicks and the install was underway. I selected a KDE environment to be installed. The installer took off, formatted the partitions and began to install. About an hour and a half later, it had finished up. This took me by surprise since usually most installs don’t take so long. Granted, this distro is based off of Gentoo, but it was starting with compiled binaries.

General Use
I rebooted after the install finished and was greeted by a kdm screen. I logged in with the user I had created to my KDE desktop. So far, so good, until I clicked on the K menu. Holy crap, this thing is loaded with apps. From what I can see, it seems they installed every KDE app under the sun. For some users, this may not be a big deal, but I have a pet peeve when it comes to apps. I don’t need 4 different web browsers, 4 different editors, etc. installed. I can only imagine the nightmare coming when I have to update KDE on this box. Keep in mind that this distro is essentially Gentoo, and even uses Gentoo’s portage. So, when update time comes, that’s an aweful lot of packages to recompile. Now, remember I mentioned that I wanted the KDE environment to be installed? Well, imagine my surprise when I found that Gnome, XFCE and Enlightenment were also installed. Either the installer has a bug, or else they figure they’d install it all. This goes back to the whole lot of everything, but I want just one thing frame of mind I have.

Overall, though, it’s pretty nifty to have a preconfigured Gentoo out of the box. nVidia drivers were working, sound was working, my USB stuff was recognized. I think it makes a nice starting point for Gentoo newbies, but for me, I’m going back to Gentoo. Why? I want to control what gets installed. Maybe if Sabayon offered a ‘base’ install of say just KDE, the panel, and one of each app, I might consider trying it again.

Final Thoughts
I’d recommend this to anyone who wants to give Gentoo a shot, but I’d caution them on the long compile times ahead due to the number of packages installed. Now there is a graphical package manager, Kuroo, but you’ll need to be careful. Remove one wrong package and something on your system will not function.

If you’re looking for a laugh, have I got a video podcast for you. Ask a Ninja should keep you rolling. The premise is pretty simple: Viewers send in questions, and the ninja answers them. It’s a hoot. I recommend checking out the back episodes, in particular Episode 10: Ninja Metal. The episodes are simple, but damn is this guy a hoot.