Raiden's Realm: Review: Sabayon Linux 5.0

Review: Sabayon Linux 5.0 (Page 1 of 1)

Written by Steve Lake
Posted on: Oct 28, 2009 at 12:47pm
Section: Reviews
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Sabayon Linux has always been known as the "swiss army knife" of Linux distributions, given all that it had installed, and all that it could do. But that title may slowly be slipping as other distributions quickly catch up to it in the "all in one" category. But does that affect how Sabayon operates? Well, let's find out.

LiveDVD

The LiveDVD starts out and boots without any fanfare or special interaction by the user. What's interesting is that as it boots up, a rock and roll song starts playing. I think it's called the “Rock and Roll Hall of Fame”, but I'm not sure. That automatically gives me warm fuzzies knowing that it detected the sound card without any problem, which also means that the other hardware was also likely detected without issue.

And it was. Everything was detected without issue.

Another interesting thing worth noting is the little key phrase that appears as the DVD is loading. It says "Open your source, open your mind". I think that's a great phrase, as it says a lot about open source, and what you should do if you want to use it.

Once the desktop loads, you're greeted with a folder that includes links for Firefox, XBMC, World of Goo (demo), Gparted and several other items. Another interesting thing that Sabayon does upon boot is it runs a disk indexer to help you have faster searches for files.

The list of software included with Sabayon is impressive as always, but of late it seems less than what it used to. Of course that's because more distros are starting to copy Sabayon's “swiss army” mentality, and are also shipping their distros packed to the hilt with software so that they're ready to go as soon as they're loaded or installed.

But that doesn't mean that Sabayon is not without its surprises. One of the biggest, for me at least, is the inclusion of Compiz tools and XBMC. That's a plus in and of itself. I could do without the Compiz, but having XBMC there has several advantages. Yes, Sabayon is a desktop distribution first, but that doesn't mean it can't also double as a DVR, or DMC.

Another interesting change I've found with Sabayon 5 is that the speed seems to have improved greatly. One of my big gripes with it in the past was that, yes it has everything and the kitchen sink, but because of that it ran like a dog. Not anymore. There is a very noticeable speed increase, and even though this has never been a problem, I still do want to point out that it's rock solid stable.

Software load times are also excellent, and I really have no complaints with how the system is running. It seems to do exactly what you need, and what it's done before, only faster.

Install

Upon starting the install, you're asked for your default language, and your default keyboard layout. After that's done, there's a third screen that's rather surprising. It gives you four install options that are rather interesting. They are “KDE desktop” (aka, a workstation), Sabayon Media Center (using XBMC), Fluxbox Empty Desktop, and Sabayon Core Environment.

So technically, you can use Sabayon in any of four different applications, including a ready to use media center. Now I'll only be testing the desktop side of things in this review, but later on I will likely also test the media center side as well, since that's something I think should also be covered, just not in this particular review.

The next several steps, save for the user/password dialog, can more or less just be skipped, allowing you to do the ever famous, “next, next, next” routine until done. You'll have to tell Sabayon how you want your disks sliced up too, but that's a minor thing to do.

Total setup time is about 20-30 minutes, depending on your machine. Once it's done, just kick out the disk, click reboot, and you're golden.

Overview

Surprisingly, there's really not a lot to say different about the installed system as there is about the live one, other than the fact that it's noticeably faster, and there are a couple extra items in the KDE menu. Otherwise, the LiveDVD and the Installed system are almost point for point identical in every way. So there's nothing really to report on here.

I will however report that multimedia runs perfectly, and all the eyecandy effects work flawlessly and look great.

Conclusion

I like the new Sabayon. It's more user friendly, it's faster, and yet it keeps all the cool stuff that make it such a great distribution for new users, without alienating those who are more experienced and want a distribution with a little bit of everything and “just works” right out of the box. I'd certainly recommend this distribution to all your friends and family. It's not for really old machines, but it should now work just fine on machines up to five to seven years old.

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