My desktop Ubuntu system is/was a 32-bit build running on 64-bit hardware. I’d been looking on-and-off for a way to in-place upgrade an Ubuntu system from i386 to x86_64, but it doesn’t look easy/feasible/worthwhile compared to a fresh install. So thinking that I was up for a reinstall anyway, I decided to check out whether Ubuntu was still the desktop Linux for me, and happened across Sabayon Linux. I’ve done the download-boot-repartition-install dance, and this post is coming from there now…
I still have the Gentoo bug, so the idea of a Gentoo system where someone else has done the work of gluing all the packages together is very appealing. It installs nicely — like many distros they use the “Live CD” approach (where you boot from a CD or DVD into a running system that you can try-before you buy, so to speak, before deciding if you want to commit it to your hard drive), and use Red Hat’s Anaconda installer to do the work of getting the system onto your disk.
It is very much a gamers system. Some popular Linux games are pre-installed, including Battle of Wesnoth, which has already cost me a decent amount of leisure time. 😉 They include things like the NVidia and ATI binary drivers, AIGLX or XGL for desktop effects thanks to Beryl, and other things like Google Earth and Kerry Beagle preinstalled. They also have support for Xen and KVM/QEMU virtualisation, and the virt-manager tool for managing virtual machines.
I started to wonder though: do they maintain a separate Portage infrastructure for their own stuff, or is it vanilla Gentoo? The answer is that for the most part it’s vanilla Gentoo. They use Layman to track their own Portage overlay, but behind it is vanilla Gentoo, which means that at a time like this, where a new release of Sabayon is just around the corner, doing an emerge world is much more likely to get stuff from Gentoo Portage than the Sabayon overlay — especially since the testing “~” keyword is set by default.
I really like what they’ve done, but to me having it backed by Gentoo Portage means that you’re back to riding the knife edge that is the Gentoo “rolling release” strategy. And after a couple of updates, you’re running Sabayon Linux in name only.
This is all based on very early experiences mind you. I haven’t had a proper chance yet to settle in and see how some of this stuff works in real life. I think I might sit tight until the 3.4 release goes out (should be soon), and get stuck into the doco then.
Crossed Wires 