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.Installation

Getting started with the install was easy enough. Just double click on the desktop icon, answer a few questions and you’re off. The first two questions you’ll answer are your language and keyboard type. Next you can choose to either install new, or recover a previously damaged install. In my case I chose new, thus all my other choices will reflect this. Now while Sabayon is predominantly a KDE based environment, the next screen does give you the option to choose between the KDE, Gnome, Fluxbox or the Sabayon Linux Core Environment. The fourth one is there in case you’re installing Sabayon as a server OS and don’t need all the bells and whistles that come with the regular desktop environment. Being a KDE user myself, I chose to go with the KDE install. Oddly enough though, on the next screen it asked if I wanted to install Gnome. Not sure why, but it did. In the next screen you’re given the ability to choose what items you do and don’t want installed with your system. All of the primary options are already checked when you get here. To add more games, or adjust other features, you’ll need to add or remove sections here. Oddly enough, it’s an all or nothing proposition in this screen. You can cherry pick what applications you want. You either get everything under the category, or nothing. Deciding I wanted the full experience, I went with the kitchen sink approach and chose everything.

The next screen is the services screen. In it you can choose from any of four different services that will run on your computer. Samba, cups and SSH are chosen by default. There’s also a nice safety note at the bottom that informs you that by disabling all of these options you’ll have a more secure system. Admittedly this is true, but it also cripples some of your network functionality. I myself went with the default options already checked. The next screen gives you the ability to automatically partition your drives, or let the computer do it for you. Unless you have a reason to do it yourself, it’s best to use the automatic partition feature here. The next two screens just a verification that you really want to wipe out everything on the drive, or you want to do something slightly different. The next two screens are grub and network configuration (you only need to do anything in here if you have a special need. Otherwise leave them untouched.) which allow you to customize either your boot or network options.

And after that is a screen where you can setup your passwords for root, setup a super user and give them a pass, and setup additional users. One good note is that the installer won’t let you continue until you specify a password and it must be at least 6 characters. After that, it’s at least an hour’s wait, and some more Rip Van Winkle time until the system is completely installed and ready for use. Once that’s done, you’re ready to dive into your newly installed copy of Sabayon.System Overview

Bootup in Sabayon is very simple with almost no options for the user to fuss with while it’s booting. You’ll be asked once more what type of desktop acceleration you want to use while booting up. The rule of thumb is, if it didn’t work on the live dvd, it won’t work here, so choose accordingly. Once on the desktop you might be surprised to see that not everything in the live dvd version made it to the desktop, with the exception of the overloaded systray. One of the first things you’ll notice if you jump into the start menu is that the menu is different. In fact, it’s VERY different. For those who haven’t been tracking the direction that KDE has been going, this is the type of menu that KDE4 will have when it comes out. Since this is already the natural direction which the KDE menu is going, expect this to become the norm in all future distributions that employ KDE, like Sabayon does.

Also, for those who are squeamish about using proprietary drivers in Linux, Sabayon might not be for you. That’s because they employ closed source proprietary hardware drivers wherever and whenever necessary. Now while not everyone will agree with this philosophy, myself included, since I believe that everything on Linux should be open source, I understand their methods and actually support it. Because at this point, without the proprietary drivers, you won’t be able to get access to the 3d capabilities of the cards. So if you want eye candy, go proprietary. If not, stay open source. In the future I hope that will change as more OEM’s open up their drivers to the general public.

Now, diving into Sabayon a little farther, I went about trying to find out how fast it ran. While not record breaking, it did run at a decent speed. Others have run faster, but Sabayon seemed slower in places than other distributions. I can’t say it was the eye candy, because aside from what was turned on, which isn’t much but the basics and a few extra things, Compiz and some of the other big performance hitters were turned off by default. And that sense of slowness didn’t apply to everything, so some of that could have been application based, but I couldn’t be for certain.

Multimedia support was quite surprisingly good overall. One downside was that for some reason the included audio cd players included in the install didn’t work for playing audio cd’s, but VLC worked fine, so if you listen to a lot of CD’s, that’s going to be one downside. Also, while there’s a lot of various multimedia applications, the only mp3 audio player is Amarok. If you want XMMS or another, you’ll need to install it yourself. Which brings me to the subject of installing software, which I’ll cover in a minute. Playing DVD’s was a bit of a chore to get started, and load times weren’t all that great, but they are doable through an interesting program called “Kaffeine Player”. It had some issues digesting some of my test DVD’s, causing lockups and other rather nasty things, but overall it did a decent job. Although VLC handled them better.

Now, on the subject of installing additional software, Sabayon uses Portato, a rather oddly named, and extremely simplistic package manager that despite its simplicity, isn’t all that easy for the new user to understand. And it can get quite confusing in a hurry. After playing with it for a bit I began to understand the concept, but it’s certainly not for the new user to Linux.

Sabayon is also packed with a lot of graphics applications. A surprising number really. One that really caught my attention was that Inkscape is included. This is an excellent vector drawing program. There was also Picasa and several other very useful graphics program such as Gimp and Kooka.

Under the internet section I found Google Earth, Azureus (didn’t expect that there!), FileZilla, Firefox, Pidgin, KMLDonkey (another I didn’t expect), Skype and many more. It’s a regular network bonanza under the internet section of the Kmenu.

For productivity, OpenOffice and Evolution are available as is several key KDE productivity apps, and even Kerry Beagle which can be used to search your computer. This program is a pretty decent desktop search tool that does an admirable job of searching the computer for things you want.

As for control and management, Sabayon seems to leave everything to the Window Manager or Desktop Environment itself, which means that the KDE Control Center is almost completely untouched and pure, as it should be. Addition configuration tools, such as the Nvidia X server settings, driver control and other things are left to be handled by other “helper” applications. For example, as part of the included eye candy, Compiz is an integral part of the environment. While it’s not on by default, a quick leap into the Compiz Settings Manager will get you going.

Now as far as overall performance goes, it wasn’t bad. It’s nothing to write home about, but it didn’t do too bad overall. There was certainly no lag that I found and few issues, other than a few applications that didn’t want to play nicely.Conclusion

Sabayon Linux is a distribution that has nearly everything for everyone in one nice, neat little package. Well, I can hardly call it small, given that it expands to over 9.5 gig once installed. Overall, the hardware support is quite good as well. In fact, it’s really good. As a downside though, it could really use a well designed centralized hardware management system. I’ve seen these in other distributions and once you’ve tried one, they’re priceless and you really come to miss them in distributions that don’t have them. Not that you’ll need to do anything right away with them, but at some point down the line you may decide to change hardware, and as such, having easy point and click management of hardware is a must.
Overall, it was a good distribution. While it offered the end user a lot, there just didn’t seem to be one thing that it really excelled at. It’s like it tried to be a jack of all trades, and got a little carried away with it. But in the end I feel that I can only give it a satisfactory rating. However, I do recommend that you should consider it and try it out at some point in time. Just go to the Sabayon website, download the ISO and try it for yourself. It’s one of those distributions that some people will like, and some won’t. But you really have to test drive it to be certain. I know some other people who I’ve run into who are just bonkers over Sabayon. So give it a try. The worst you’ll loose is a few hours and a burnable dvd disk.