Destructive Incorporated

It's been a long time since I gave Sabayon Linux 3.1 such a rave review. A lot has changed in that time. The distribution is still based on the ~arch branch of Gentoo Linux, the biggest addition is the new binary package manager "entropy" and its front-ends: spritz (X) and equo (CLI). One of my favorite things about gentoo is the source-based nature of the distribution; you can always just rebuild everything from source with a couple commands in the console. There is no waiting for the package maintainer or distribution to update the binary packages for each program that has been updated. With portage it's normally just a couple lines of code to keep each ebuild up to date. Entropy, on the other hand, is a binary package manager. There is support for certain functionality (USE flags) compiled into each package, while support for other features could be missing... not really my idea of fun. The chief architect of Sabayon is Fabio Erculiani and he does a great job of keeping the packages in the entropy repositories up to date.

1. Default Desktop

The install process went very smoothly, I did have it crash twice while trying to format my swap partition when it was a logical partition rather than primary. I can't really explain the reason for this but after making my swap a primary partition everything was fine. The first thing I noticed on first boot is the much improved bootsplash. Now a great looking simple blue screen, nothing overwhelming like the 3.3/3.4 series red themes. The default KDE desktop is also much better looking in my opinion. After doing some manual configuration to get my wireless card working (knetworkmanager couldn't find any wireless networks) the X frontend to entropy spent about 5 minutes downloading information to tell me that it had 49 packages I needed to update (this process is repeated at each boot). The interface to spritz is very clunky and drawn out. Once you review the updates you have to add them to the queue, then you must click on the queue button and click start... I figured the people wanting binary packages would probably be more into the one click approach. Spritz took about 45 minutes to download all the binary package upgrades from the default repository in Italy averaging about 40k/s, not stellar but not horrid either. The real disappointment came when spritz started installing the packages. It literally took longer to install the 49 package updates than it did to install the entire distribution from DVD. Something is wrong here. I decided to customize some config files while I waited. vi /etc/make.conf -- vi: command not found. hmm ok. emerge -v vim -- emerge: there are no ebuilds to satisfy "app-editors/vim". hmm ok. eix vim -- eix: command not found. wtf?? Two of my most used tools aren't included by default, and aren't trivial to install? not a good start. A little research revealed that /usr/portage didn't contain portage, but just the sabayon overlay and profiles directories. emerge --sync got me back in business. Needless to say, I'm very disappointed in the decision to migrate away from emerge/portage. My laptop has an ATI Radeon Xpress 200M integrated graphics solution. It's a piece of shit, but still runs compiz and other simple 3D tasks fairly well. Sabayon however failed to provide 3D acceleration on the base install. I'll probably remedy this by setting up DRI, or possibly waiting a little bit and trying DRI2 with Xorg 1.5. Opening up Firefox 3.0 defaulted into offline mode.. File -> Work Online solved that. Despite my functioning-but-undetected wireless connection, lack of 3D acceleration, and all my gripes about entropy there are many great additions to this release.

1. emerge --sync

Version 3.5 has laid out a lot of the foundation necessary to have seemless entropy-based upgrades in the future, as well as provide an easy method to evaluate KDE4. The visual improvements are terrific. The package list is up to date and relevant, including KDE 3.5.9, Firefox 3.0, Wine 1.0, Gnome 2.22, OpenOffice 2.4 etc. This distro really has everything you need to start working/playing right out of the box. I was very excited to try out the new baselayout2/openrc boot scripts. The old boot scripts were written in bash with many C calls included. This was nice and simple and worked great for years until things started getting much too bloated. openrc/baselayout2 is a complete rewrite of these same scripts in C, and it has made a huge difference. My laptop boots 3.5 in about 35 seconds from the grub screen to my kde desktop. On 3.4 it would often take three times that long.



1. The Gimp

I have only been using 3.5 for 4 days, and honestly have yet to give entropy a fair shot, but overall I've been disappointed. Out of the box compatibility has beem worse for my laptop with this release than the previous. I'm sure most of the issues I've had will not effect the vast majority of users. I will probably update this article in a couple weeks with a more thorough examination after some testing on my daily use desktop machine.