Review: Sabayon Linux 3.4a (Page 1 of 4)
Written by
Steve Lake
Posted on: Aug 24, 2007 at 04:30pm
Section:
Reviews
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Sabayon Linux is a distribution that seeks to take the Linux desktop and put an artistic spin to it that other distributions don’t have. Their motto of “when art meets inspiration” speaks highly to this desire. But what makes Sabayon stand out from all the rest? It’s the eye candy and the focus on a more graphics and feature rich environment for the end user. Sabayon Linux is also a somewhat new distribution on the block having come from RR4 which is ultimately a derivative of Gentoo which is ultimately a derivative of Enoch. So how does Sabayon match up against some of the bigger players in the market like Vector and PcLinuxOS? Let’s take a look.
Live DVD
The Sabayon DVD install disk weighs in at an impressive 4.13gb and comes pre-packaged with a wide selection of popular software. The first thing you’re greeted with upon booting the dvd is a choice of several boot options. These include:
· Start Sabayon Linux 3.4
· Start without music
· Anonymous Internet Browsing
· Start Graphical Installation
· Start Text Installation
· XsistenCe (Persistent Home)
· Play with Sauerbraten (Game)
· Play with Savage (Game)
The options themselves are fairly self explanatory, save for a couple. So let me take a few moments and explain those for you. The second option, “Start without music” is there because, interestingly enough, the Sabayon live dvd starts with music that plays at various points during bootup. Weird for certain, but I guess it goes with the whole “art” theme. The Anonymous Internet Browsing function, which is the third item on the list, is supposed to give you a completely anonymous internet browsing experience. Sadly, it doesn’t do that. Sure, it gives you some extra privacy features and tools, but nothing that anonymizes your experience. The graphical installation option loads you into a graphical installer under Fluxbox, one of the Window Managers included with Sabayon (This is a KDE based distribution, but Fluxbox is included for those wanting a light weight desktop experience), but first has to load almost all of the Sabayon live dvd to do it. Same with the text installer. It has to almost completely load Sabayon before beginning the install, which can take anywhere from three to five minutes, a load time which seems a bit long to me. Plus having to load the entire live environment, minus the window manager, just to use the text installer seems a bit silly to me. And regardless of which way you go with your bootup, it will still take a long time to load Sabayon.
XsistenCe is a system that allows you to take your settings wherever you go. If you load into that at boot, you’ll need your pen drive plugged in beforehand in order to take advantage of this since the system loads these settings at boot. The two bootable games that came with the live dvd interested me enough to try them. So I booted them up, waited like Rip Van Winkle for Sauerbraten to load, then jumped immediately into the game without waiting any further. Then I promptly crashed. Absolute hardcore lockup. I blame Saurerbraten more for this than Sabayon, as I’ve had nothing but problems with the game since day one. But I do blame them for not using something like Nexuiz instead as it’s a far better game. But semantics aside, I then tried Savage. It actually played well and had no lag or loading issues.
Moving on and booting directly into the live dvd I was first greeted by the Nvidia driver logo, and then a screen asking about graphics acceleration. One of the features of the live dvd is the included ability to do graphics acceleration. (This also carries on over into the installed version) There are two systems offered that can provide you with all you need for an improved graphics experience. These include AIGLX and XGL. Oddly though, when I tried either of these, I received consistent lockups, crash to white screen and other rather bothersome problems. Operating without them though did work fine. (Not sure why XGL crashed on me, because I’ve never really had any issues with it before, but it would be understandable under AIGLX as that’s never worked for me.) Once on the desktop, the wide number of applications included with Sabayon intrigued me. There seemed to be quite a large selection of included KDE applications and even a whole variety of 3rd party applications as well. Another thing that stood out was the modest selection of included games such as Nexuiz, Danger from the Deep, Savage, Second Life and others. To say that this surprised me is an understatement. The development team apparently expected you to install these anyways, so they’ve included them on the DVD for you. Another thing that interested me was that there’s an included “Get Live Help” shortcut. This opens a copy of Konversation, a KDE utility designed to log you into the Freenode IRC server where you can get quick and easy help with any problems you have in Sabayon or KDE.
Jumping in from here I explored the system a bit and found it to be fairly good. Not as good as other live dvd’s, and a bit clumsy in places, but still usable. The persistent red theme though threw me a bit and I think added to some of my frustration while testing though. For those that don’t know, colors *do* affect you, and red is one that tends to elicit anger or be associated with it. Not a wise choice for the theme in my opinion given that fact. Also, be aware that the KDE setup for Sabayon is not the typical KDE setup. They’ve moved the pager to the top, along with the systray and clock and attached them to a special toolbar dock.
Something that bothered me about the desktop is the number of applications that are loading at startup. The systray in Sabayon reminds me of the systray in Windows after someone’s been getting install happy. I understand the developers desire to be a “point, click and go” distribution, but the contents of the systray are a bit on the side of overkill. I say this because the more that’s loaded, the more of a performance hit you take. An option they could consider for the future would be to ask the user which items they want loaded at startup as far as the systray is concerned. It’s not necessary, but it is something to think about. As for the games, all of them worked great except Flight Gear, a Linux flight simulator, which kept locking up Sabayon for some unknown reason. As for the rest of the games and the system, there was no lag that I could find save for the occasional time when the live dvd had to dive into the disk to grab something.
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Average vistor rating: 3.8 out of 5 (24 total votes) | |
