Sabayon
 

Has anyone heard about this distro?

Hi,
Sabayon is based on Gentoo. I was meant to try it, but haven't got around to it. It has its own repositories, but can also use Gentoo's.

Being based on Gentoo makes it fast, as everything you install gets compiled specifically for your hardware.

Yes, I use Sabayon on a couple of machines that are essentially 'eye candy' for visiting clients.

If you have a half decent video card Sabayon looks quite beautiful - lots of CompizFusion/Emerald slick graphics and an impressive standard black/red theme.

Despite the fact that it is robust and relatively fast its main strength is in its looks....

Have you heard about "search engines" ?
Why don't you just try it?

The other two responces were quite helpful, thanks for dropping by though.

I saw some videos of it on youtube, it does look pretty swish, one of the vids was titled Vista Killa or something. I want.

Would you describe it as Gentoo desktop?

Screw it, I'm out to download this thing. I already like Gentoo, hope it's less fiddly to install though.

No, it wouldn't be right to call it a Gentoo Desktop, any more than you call Ubuntu a Debian desktop.
Sabayon is relatively new, which makes it quiet close to Gentoo still (behind the scenes at least). Sabayon users sometimes ask questions on the Gentoo forums.

You do have to know your command line when installing Gentoo, I look forward to hearing how Sabayon is in that respect ;)

Go for it.

Hello,

If that's your main reason to try Gentoo then you might be deceived. The performance gain from using a specific -march option when compiling is not going to produce any noticeable result.

The main strengths of Gentoo are USE flags and a very basic default system, so, no extra crap is installed if you don't want it. The performance gain from custom CFLAGS, if any, is marginal.

And, if you use binary packages, which is what Sabayon does, then you lose all that flexibility, which is in my opinion what Gentoo is about.

You can tune any distro to look the same way. And, besides that, that's just a subjective opinion. I find crytal-like themes to be quite horrible.

No. It's not Gentoo, just like Fedora is not RedHat, and Ubuntu is not Debian.

I recently made the switch to Sabayon, so far I've been quite pleased. It seems less buggy than Ubuntu was and the installation was much easier than Gentoo.

One tip on the installation: manually partition your hard drive. I used the auto partition because I was feeling lazy when I installed and it did somethings on the main partition with logical volumes that I'm not completely sure about. I just know that I couldn't mount my main partition while running a live cd, so it may make rescuing files difficult if you run into issues or do something stupid.

True, Sabayon offers some binary packages, as does Gentoo; however, in every instance that I've seen a binary package, I've also found the option available to install from source and the vast majority of the packages are source that gets compiled at the time of emerging. My understanding of the way Sabayon handles Portage is that you sync with Gentoo's Portage tree and also sync a Sabayon Portage tree that overlays Gentoo's.

I can't seem to boot from the Sabayon installation DVD :(

Does anyone have a link to an iso file I can burn that has worked for them to boot from please?

(The Sabayon site lists torrents but there's no links for me to use rtorrent on, it's all gui client stuff).

its hardware recognition and compatibility is fabolous
 

I've been using Sabayon for about 2 years as 4°distro BOOTING IN A NOTEBOOK Intel 5450 2 Core 2 Duo with 2 gb ram with Vista,Pclinux Kde,Mint 4.0 CE,
,NOW I USE the 3.4 version which i just downloaded from Sabayon home page and works without any problems,its hardware recognition and compatibility is as Fabolous as Pclinux and Mint ones..its only defects are:

1)its boot is slower than other distros

2)it needs about 12 GB of HD space for the basic installation !

3)when you install something from its repos,you can wait hundreads of time 'cos it DOWNLOADS AND COMPILES SOURCES AS GENTOO DOES..maybe you'd bettertake a coffee and a walk in the meantime

i SUGGEST you to try it...

Good luck !

Uhm..for the booting problems..have you enabled cd-rom boot from the BIOS as first boot option ?

As soon as you get a working DVD you have to set it enabled !

Anyway---i suggest you to use Ktorrent or azureus or transmission,they all have guis and are very easy to be used !