Sabayon Linux

[Rob Williams]

RR4 is now known as Sabayon, and since it's based on Gentoo, I had to give it a try. It's currently in internal beta, but you can grab it later this month.

After playing around with it for a while, I find it has a ton of potential, although it's rather bloated in terms of software included. While Gentoo lets you start as a base and build up, Sabayon throws a bunch at you. This will be fixed nearer to it's launch though, I'm told.

Here are some screenshots of the RC2 for those interested. Note the versions... very up to date software!









Overall, I can say the distro has some awesome hardware detection, and activates NVIDIA, WiFi [Depending] and Bluetooth even off the Live DVD. Installation took around 90 minutes and used 7GB of HDD space. I am hoping to see them add package groups during the install before release though, because it really is far too bloated for my liking.

I should also note that Sabayon supports XGL also... even off the Live DVD. Great Gentoo based distro overall. With some tweaks, it could be superb.

[Michael]

Wow, looks quite interesting... I'll have to check it out later this month.

[Rob Williams]

I should also mention, that the name of the distro is derived from an Italian desert, as odd as it may be. I also have to say I am impressed by the overall support that the distro offers. When I think of a Gentoo system, it's nothing like this.

For instance, DVD video worked off the getgo... perfectly. As did other videos and such. XGL worked seamlessly also... and it's actually a far newer version than I found in SuSE 10.1, so it's been updated a bit. Oh, plus it auto mounts and unmounts anything you plug in, which is nice.