Sabayon being a rolling-release distro, this is just a new installation disk. The installer remains a customised Anaconda, with support for encryption, RAID, LVM, and lots of filing systems. This time I’ve tested the new Mate version.

The first surprise is that the only applications are Midori, Xchat, and Audacious! At least they all worked this time. Media codecs are installed, but the Flash plugin has been dropped. I added Parole for a video player and it worked perfectly, unlike 3 months ago. Of course, with a ‘bleeding-edge’ distro you never know if it will continue working past the next upgrade. Selecting USB speakers also worked this time.

I decided to installed LibreOffice Writer. Unfortunately, you have to install the whole package in Sabayon. I was also given complete set of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Indian fonts! The process was not so much a case of ‘have a cup of tea while it’s installing’ as ‘go out for lunch’. Similarly, I installed im-chooser (which didn’t work) and got given Perl and MySQL as well.

The keyboard shortcut tool has the bug of not allowing the Super key, and pressing the WWW button results in an attempt to start Epiphany, despite the fact that Midori is set as the default browser. If you know what to do, you can cure these problems with Mate’s configuration editor, but that’s not installed by default.

With Sabayon, there’s always something: last time, videos; this time, dependency resolution. I suspect that most of its users double-boot with Windows, so they’ve always got something to fall back on.

I checked out of curiosity a Gnome version of S10AMD64 and...
I fired it from USB. Worked (live) without problems with acceptable resolution (NVIDIA9500GT) which I could correct just by using control panel. I like it. Best regards.