Distro testing marathon - Sabayon - day 1/3

My third distro which I'm testing on this marathon is Sabayon. It's somewhat different than other distros that I'm used too, at least from the package management point of view, Sabayon being a Gentoo child on this matter. I had the opportunity to test Gentoo some months ago when I fiddled with my PandaBoard. Now I'll try for the next three days to get acquainted to Sabayon and see how easy is compared to Gentoo which IMHO is too time-consuming.

Installation

I've downloaded and used for installation the Sabayon_Linux_6_amd64_K.iso image. I've noticed that there was an option in the menu to go straight to Installation but I was too excited to see it in action so I've booted in Live mode. That proved to be a big mistake because I almost got a hearth attack! The boot sound (more like song) scared the hell out of me! The room was quiet and then suddenly… boom! After I grabbed my heart from the floor I've started the installer. It got familiar, the anaconda installer, like Fedora, no big fuss. A nice thing, I had the option to remove the unwanted language files and so I did. The installation took a while longer than Fedora and LMDE.

Configuration

After the first boot I've noticed that the Nvidia driver was already there. After the desktop was completely loaded I saw that there were no errors related to the UID/GID and I thought that maybe the installer knew automagically my old UID/GID and set them accordingly. Well, it wasn't the case, the UID/GID was once again 1000/1001 and even if I've tried to modify them back in /etc/passwd and /etc/group it was a no joy, there was an error about kstartupconfig4 not being able to do something… and KDE didn't load. So, back to 1000/1001! Sabayon has as default browser Chromium. With this it killed two birds with one stone because first, you have a browser and second it had flash-player already installed! So, no need for flash installatiion there.

One more nice thing, the repositories have a plethora of packages, like Skype, Opera, flash-player (yes, I'm talking mainly about the non-free ones).

One bad thing about the repositories is the speed. Entropy doesn't know anything about geolocation or such in order to get me the closest and maybe fastest mirrors. I've managed to set a fast repository and now it's much better. Still, there should be some mechanism of setting the fastest mirrors for your system.

Apps

There are plenty of apps, there's already LibreOffice installed for your office needs, VLC, Clementine and even XBMC for multimedia and so on. One thing that I don't really like is why do we have the QT-devel tools (Designer, Linguist, Assistant)?! I really don't get that one. Instead we miss an app for torrents like KTorrent.

Random

The update notification applet keeps popping up when an update process is active. It keeps nagging me that “there are x updates avaiable” on and on. Maybe it should be disabled on the duration of the update process.

Another one annoying pop-up is with Akonadi complaining about Nepomuk whic is not started. Well, I want Nepomuk/Strigi off so it should stop keep popping-up at random times. I know, this is a KDE problem but still, maybe the Sabayon team could look into it and mute Akonadi or provide some mechanism for that.

Same as LMDE, Sabayon had the system bell problem. I had to blacklist pcspkr module.

Conclusion

Sabayon seems to be a well-built distro which tries to make Gentoo accessible to the dumb user. It has a blazing fast boot speed and very nice looks. Tomorrow I'll get back with more, so stay tuned!