Install(xperience)

There’s an ‘Install on Disk’ (live installer) shortcut right on the desktop. The installer is based on Anaconda, so Fedora users should feel right at home. The Sabayon version is customised to an extent to include some other choices. For example, the third screen gives you an option to choose between a KDE desktop (or GNOME, if you’ve booted into that DE), XBMC media centre or Fluxbox. The following screen gives you an option to select/deselect the broad software categories—office apps, Internet apps, multimedia apps, and basic free games. The next screen is where you’ll enable/disable the following services: Samba, Cups, NFS, SSH.

Figure 3: Package categories in Sabayon installer

Strangely, once you’re done with the partition set-up, if your root is less than 8GB in size, the installer gives a warning. Ignoring it is a safe bet as, post installation, it only covers up around 4.2 GB of disk space. Probably this is a message that was introduced when Sabayon was a single bootable DVD consisting of both KDE and GNOME, but it doesn’t make sense any more now that the ISOs have been split up.

Also, being based on the Anaconda installer, the Grub boot screen would only show the options of choosing between Sabayon and ‘Others’. However, post installation, when you reboot, you should see all your other distros on the boot screen—at least that’s what happened in my case.

Figure 4: Installation in progress

The final installation (file copying) process takes a while—around 10 to 15 minutes. And then you reboot!

Package manage(xperience)

Now that you have the distro installed on your system, you’d obviously want to install the missing packages.

Sulfur as a package manager is really slow—every time you want to navigate to a new tab, you get a “Please wait …take a break!” message. Additionally, it has a severely clumsy-looking UI, as if designed in the last century. Although the options are straightforward, they could  become confusing when an application fails to install because of some error. Besides, buttons and options have been spread around multiple tabs, which makes using Sulfur awfully cumbersome. However, I’ve got to admit  that the online repository has a decent collection of applications, and the mirrors are pretty fast.

An interesting point is that packages here have user ratings, which can be useful when you have to choose between multiple alternatives that serve the same purpose. However, note that the Sabayon user base is certainly not comparable to Ubuntu’s to give you foolproof ratings. For example, Choqok is perhaps one of the best Twitter clients, yet it has got no ratings here. So, if you have a Sabayon online account, you might as well rate packages to make life easier for future users.