Destructive Incorporated

This Gentoo-based distro is going to be one to watch. Rock-solid stability and endless flexibility, all wrapped into a 3.3GB LiveDVD environment packed to the brim with the latest builds of the latest software. So then, what makes Sabayon Linux so special? I'm glad you asked.

The strength of this OS comes not only from the abundance of current software available, but also from its roots in Gentoo Linux, which has long been known for its adaptability and pure speed. Gentoo's portage houses thousands (tens of thousands?) of programs which can be installed, via source, using every setting specified in make.conf, using build options depending on my USE flags. Dependencies are all resolved automatically by emerge (best thing since sliced bread). Boot scripts are easily modified with rc-update (so far my favorite runlevel modification tool). System updates (Sabayon follows the ~arch branch) can be made as easily as 'emerge –sync && emerge -uvDNa world' followed by 'etc-update' which will keep my install up to date with the latest security patches, bug fixes, and killer new features. There are hundreds of Gentoo reviews online and anything more in-depth goes beyond the scope of this article. Sabayon provides a very capable "livecd" environment with tons of the newest software all pre-installed to accomplish work fast. If work isn't your thing you can always kick back and play a little Cold War, or Quake 4 as both of these demos are provided on the LiveDVD.

1. Installer

While I really enjoyed having the most current versions of Firefox, OpenOffice, K9copy, MPlayer, tvtime, .... I really don't need four email programs, or six text editors, or eight media players especially all in my “start” menu. I found myself deleting menu items like red lobster when that fat guy from Lost is around. I am however on a dial-up connection at home and having all these programs pre-installed was great. A little cleanup work with emerge -C and I freed up some space on my hard disk (the default install from dvd is about 7gb) and more importantly my “start” menu.

I was attracted to Sabayon Linux due to its Gentoo base and the promise that AIGLX and XGL would be functioning on the 3.1 LiveDVD. Simply entering 'sabayon aiglx' at the CD boot prompt will eventually bring you a great looking beryl/AIGLX-enhanced KDE workspace. I've tooled around with XGL on Ubuntu and Gentoo in the past and have had nothing but crash after crash and feature removal after feature removal so I was really skeptical about AIGLX, but I have been pleasantly surprised so far. Testing the system on a P4-2.0ghz/512MB/GeForce2 mx200 and a Athlon64-3000+/1GB/GeForce3 Ti200 has left a permanent grin on my face. Not only does AIGLX perform much faster than XGL, but it uses a fraction of the system resources and I have yet to experience a crash after about a week of work and home use whereas with XGL I couldn't use my desktop for ten minutes before it would break/crash/lockup. Great work guys.

If eye candy isn't your thing, don't leave yet! Sabayon is still a full fledged Gentoo installation and I've yet to find something I could do in Gentoo that has given me issues in Sabayon. One of the biggest advantages of Gentoo is the install process: tedious, drawn-out, and precise. Most users however don't find these things so appealing and SL does a great job of providing a Gentoo install in a fraction of the time. The gui installer worked better than advertised for me. One of my biggest gripes with Sabayon has to be the boot/installation times. It took nearly an hour to install on the P4 system and longer than XP to install on the Athlon box... I've booted the LiveDVD (SL v3.0) on several systems and have been very unimpressed with the boot times and have often thought the system has hung. I've heard this might be a problem with the nVidia driver detection/loading and may be fixed with v3.1 but nonetheless this is an area that needs improvement. On the Athlon system an upgrade (basically a clean install) took like fifteen hours, no joke. Now I realize that stuff takes a little longer when using a source distribution, but I didn't see a single instance of gcc pop up when upgrading, so I think this also is something that can be resolved with a little work.

2. Storage Media

As slow as SL was to boot, install, and upgrade, I've been pleasantly surprised by the performance both in the live environment and with a hard-disk install. The boot times of the hard disk installs are easily 150% as long as a similarly configured Gentoo install which is an issue I've yet to resolve. It really is fast, really. Try it! www.sabayonlinux.org.

Sabayon Linux has provided me with a great "Live" environment, a hassle-free, easy and nearly “hands-off” way to install a great operating system with the ability to update every piece of the entire system with fifteen seconds worth of typing.

3. Default Desktop