Sabayon 5.0 is a veru good Distro!
easy, fast, high performance, by powerfull as the gentoo.
Green, Sabayon is totally different of Ubuntu, and is a differente linux, also.
Sabayon uses a special binary installer, entropy, that install gentoo binaries optimized for hardware architeture, but also may use the Portage, the installer of Gentoo, that automatically make their binaries from sources (compilation linux).
therefore, sabayon is a binary-compilation Linux.
Sabayon is my favorite Distro, i use Gentoo also.

After hearing so much about Linux, I decided to give it a try a couple of years ago. I started with Ubuntu. It totally screwed up my machine. Maybe it was just me! I like the graphics in Linux and I like that you can configure it just about any way you desire. However, Linux DOES have its faults also just like Windows. What I don’t like about Linux is that there are some programs that will not run on it. Programs that I HAVE to HAVE. They won’t work on Wine either. So, Windows has its pluses and minuses also. Everybody raves about Microsoft and Bill Gates, well, if it wasn’t for Bill Gates we’d all be using Mac’s which, I guess is a good thing. Anyway, some hate windows, some like it. Some hate Linux, some like it. As for me, I’m going to continue to use both of them.

” This is a INSTALATION’s review, not a DISTRIBUTION’s review”:

well, as most distributions are meant to be installed, that is rather logical…

The exception is with live CDs/DVDs , as they are not meant to be *systematically* installed :
I used Sab ayon 5.0 as a live DVD to unetboot (on a net”book”), and, though it had nice features (keymap selection, NTFS partitions are easily mounted) it is less easy
*to add software (it seems illogical, but with a huge file | filesystem mapping /usr/local or /opt, it is often rather easy to recompile parts from source and to complete a live CD) and
*to use than Scientific Linux liveDVD (some headers are missing in tcl/tk; KDE never crashed -in the case of Sabayon 5.0 and me- , but seems to have an irregular RAM greediness, with spikes; Scientific Linux asks you to choose a password every time you booot from its DVD, which might be safer than having no/a predefined password like Sabayon).

I’ve installed lots of distros, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Slackware, LinuxMint, OpenSuse, and others, on VMWare, VirtualBox, Parallels or VirtualPC, and I must say that I found more problems installing on my PC than in a virtual machine, and generally, if I had a problem when installing in a virtual machine, on my PC there were even more problems. As for Sabayon 5, the installer crashed two or three times before I could install the system on my computer. After that everything was ok, but I can think of a few other linux systems wich are faster, and more configurable. But again, is a good distro and it worth a try.

Good review (albeit somewhat brief). Sabayon really sets itself apart from Gentoo with the Entropy package manager. This can be utilized by the “equo” command or through the GUI called “Sulfur”.
The speed of Sabayon has been an issue since before I first tried it way back during the 3.x series. It has come a long way in boot speed but installation could use some improvement, as you mentioned. And the package selection during install has been requested before, but likely requires a good amount of re-work and tweaking.
Another thing I can’t say I’m fond of is the boot song. I remember the 3.x series and its bold ambient music song that played. But that’s just my personal taste.

This morning I installed Sabayon 5.0 with KDE. The install process took 30 minutes, 27 of which was the actual writing of the files to disk. For comparison an install of PCLinuxOS took 10 minutes and an install of Simply MEPIS 8.0 took 15 minutes on the same machine. I had no problems with the reboot from disk but then I did not use any virtualization software. The boot process takes noticeably longer than in other distros.

Using Sulphur, Sabayon’s graphic software manager, I tried to remove some of the software that I did not want. A pleasant experience it was not. Sulphur is a renamed Spritz, a package manager from previous versions of Sabayon. Both are just a rebranded KPackage. In comparison to Synaptic, Sulphur seems very primitive. I encountered a few problems with Sulphur. Package definitions longer than about 30 characters were cut off with no way to change the column width to show more of the definition. When canceling a Purge or Remove actions, the chosen package is not un-marked as it would be in Synaptic. When I tried to remove unwanted fonts (arabic, cyrillic, thai, etc.) Sulphur indicated that it will also remove xorg-x11 package which would have pretty much disabled the GUI. This is not a problem as much with Sulphur as with how Sabayon is put together.

As far as I am concerned, Sabayon looks nice, runs slowly and is not a distro that I would use long term.

go green and save energy wrote:

I am not really satisfied with your review of sabayon 5…Actually i would rather like to see the review of KDE version of Sabayon as it is using the latest version 4.3.1 which is yet to see in a major distro….So it will be better to review KDE version in this review than a all familiar Gnome 2.26…..
Another suggestion i’m having is you didn’t even mention the SOFTWARE INSTALLATION METHODS used in sabayon as it will be entirely different from ubuntu….i haven’t even tried a gentoo based distro yet…i’m very curious to know about the software installation methods used in sabayon(like ubuntu is having apt get,synaptic,.deb etc…)please update blog with one more page describing software installation method in sabayon….It will be useful for people like me…
Another complaint i’m having is your blog lacks real content in review of distros…the only detailed review i have seen in your blog is the review of Linux Mint 7….other reviews are rather a copy of details given in the release notes of the distros and some wiki articles,which is used to fill first 3 pages of your review…These details can easily available from the distros website or from wikipedia,eventhough it will be useful to see everything in one site…if you are giving the above thing in your blog please dedicate ONE OR TWO PAGES EXTRA for more details like SOFTWARE INSTALLATION METHODS …
please consider these things and please give update about software installation methods….

Thanks for the feedback, I’ll try to include more details about software install methods in the apps section of the review. As far as including what’s new, etc. I think it’s necessary to put it in the review because some folks might not bother to go to the distro’s site to read it. All of that info should be included within the review.

chickpea wrote:

Well, thanks for the review, but it falls a little short in my book. First of all, installing in a VM is a little more advanced than beginner linux for starters, so bashing SL for being bad for n00bs but using it in a way that n00bs would not use it, is unfair. That aside, the KDE version has traditionally been better in many respects. You failed to mention anything about the full disk encryption which is a new option in the installer for this release (along with Ubuntu and Debian IIRC as the ONLY distros which provide this important option at install).
For the previous commenter, Sabayon Linux uses Entropy (an in-house binary package manager). It is very slick on the CLI, if that’s your thing, also we have a GUI front-end sulphur which the review mentioned. SL does also theoretically work with portage and Ciaran’s package manager (can’t recall the name off hand), but such usage portage/entropy combined is HIGHLY dangerous for people who don’t know what the hell they are doing with portage and entropy. Entropy is on par with apt-get in terms of functionality and speed (although we would point out that in many respects it is better :P).

I’ll try to do more with KDE but I do lean a little toward Gnome. Can’t help it, it’s just more my thing than KDE. KDE is great too but we all have our own preferences. I’ll bear your comment in mind though for future reviews of Sabayon Linux.

CJ wrote:

I too have to agree that the review more or less sucked! You completely glossed over most of the aspects that make Sabayon interesting. I’m an Ubuntu user but I’ve tried each release of Sabayon and find it to be a rather nice distro. As has been pointed out, reviewing a distro in a virtualized environment isn’t something a n00b is likely to be doing. Besides that I’ve found that most times a virtualized install introduces issues that aren’t present in a hard drive install.

What would you have liked to be included in the review? Please be specific and I’ll try to incorporate your ideas into future reviews.

g wrote:

This is a INSTALATION’s review, not a DISTRIBUTION’s review

What would you have preferred to see included? Constructive feedback with detailed ideas is always welcome.

I too have to agree that the review more or less sucked! You completely glossed over most of the aspects that make Sabayon interesting. I’m an Ubuntu user but I’ve tried each release of Sabayon and find it to be a rather nice distro. As has been pointed out, reviewing a distro in a virtualized environment isn’t something a n00b is likely to be doing. Besides that I’ve found that most times a virtualized install introduces issues that aren’t present in a hard drive install.

This is a INSTALATION’s review, not a DISTRIBUTION’s review

Wow, a lot of critics out there today! Perhaps a few of you should write your own review of Sabayan – which Jim welcomes, to get more points of view.

I did try out Sabayan Live, and I tried the KDE edition. Considering the supposed fast Gentoo roots, I was not terribly impressed with the performance I got, especially since I am comparing it to a lot of distributions that I run the same way. What I’ll conclude, rather than suggesting that the distribution is not any good is just comment that it is not my style or preference.

It was OK booting, but probably 60% of the other systems I’ve tested have started up faster. In the KDE 4.3.1 edition, I got a number of error messages, which I believe were coming from the desktop search application, but I generally do not use that anyway, so other than the annoyance, they did not disturb me further.

I am not a particularly heavy user of test systems either, unless I am specifically doing quality assurance testing, which is another matter. In this case, I just wanted to do a quick evaluation to see if this one would interest me or not.

What I will say is that it browses fine, it will install the KDE 4.3.1 version in a Virtualbox OSE environment without any problems, and once loaded, it provides acceptable performance.

Friends I know that have used Sabayon in the past seem to like the game collection; I am not a gamer so that doesn’t matter to me, but for those who are, that may be one reason you would want to try out this distribution. Another reason might be if you like the Gentoo source packaging method, but you want an easier, more stable starting point, then Sabayon might be just the thing for you.

For me, it’s OK, but I’m more tied to the Debian way of doing things. Since Jim reviewed the GNOME version and I checked out the KDE version, they both work. I’d tend to favor the KDE release. sidux released a KDE 4 release, and with rolling upgrades, you can run KDE 4.3.1 on it, but this is the first release (Mandriva and Kubuntu are on its heels) that has actually released ISO images with KDE 4.3.1, so that may be another compelling reason for some people to try out this release.

The Firefox Web Browser is the latest 3.5.3 release, and it works smoothly, even live and in a Virtualbox instance, so that is another positive.

Thanks for the review Jim!