SABAYON Linux's live DVD provides one of the easiest ways of getting a Gentoo-based system installed on your PC, and its consistent top-10 Distrowatch listing is testament to its success.
But two things have always kept me from delving deeper into Sabayon, and the first of those is that Gentoo heritage.
Now, before Gentoo lovers start bombarding me with criticism, let me clarify; it simply comes down to personal taste.
Gentoo and its derivatives are perfectly good, perfectly capable Linux distributions - it's just that I've never really 'taken' to them.
The main reason is the Portage software installation system (and its component parts, ebuilds and emerge), which I have never found to be as simple nor as straightforward as those employed by, say, Debian/Ubuntu or PCLOS/Fedora/Mandriva.
I readily accept this may well be a failing on my part, and no doubt Gentoo fans will have a thousand reasons why Portage is the bees knees. That's fine - I'm genuinely happy that they're happy!
The second reason I have steered clear of Sabayon is the sheer size of the standard live DVD and the bewildering array of choices it presents the user.
Choice is good, but sometimes too much choice can be a bad thing.
Plus, to make the most of its Compiz-driven 3D wizardry, you need a powerful PC and mine are anything but cutting edge.
So, I have been waiting quite a while for Sabayon 4 Lite MCE: A version of Sabayon Linux which might not leave me feeling quite so overwhelmed.
I couldn't help but smile when reading project leader Fabio Erculiani's almost joyful press release on the arrival of Sabayon 4 Lite MCE:
HOPE TODAYThat's smashing, isn't it? And I felt somewhat vindicated in my prejudices when I read Fabio's opening paragraph, where he talks about simplicity over complexity and "less is more".
Dedicated to those who like order over chaos, to those who like simplicity over complexity, to those who think that less is more, to those that just want more for less.
Lite MCE will catch you, based on Sabayon 4, represent what can be the future of our Operating System: just the best of the Out-Of-The-Box, just GNOME and nothing more than what you need for your daily tasks, but what about your free time?
We've got it. Xbox Media Center 8.10 just landed on the Linux Planet, so what's better than having it ready to use?
And why not, don't you think it's time to prepare your cheap Media Center platform to watch your movies and Internet TV channels?
Show off the new Sabayon Linux to your friends, they have no more excuses to not try it!
Anyway, on with my review.
S4 Lite, as I'll call it, weighs in at a shade over 2GBs so it's not a light distribution in the sense that Damn Small Linux is, but it is a damn sight smaller than a full Sabayon installation disk.
Now, let me explain a little about S4 Lite's boot process, because there are eight options:
1. S4 Lite
2. S4 Lite 3D
3. S4 Lite MCE
4. S4 Lite UMPC
5. S4 Lite UMPC 3D
6. S4 MCE UMPC
7. Graphical installation s4 Lite
8. Graphical installation S4 Lite 3D
What was I saying about not being overwhelmed with options?
The first two boot options are obvious; the third relates to running a standalone version of S4 Lite's Xbox Media Centre, which I'll cover later in more detail.
The 4th, 5th and 6th choices allow for running or installing S4 Lite on a netbook (I don't own one, so I cannot say how successful this version is) and the final two options are self-explanatory.
My first run-through was via option 3, a live version of S4 Lite MCE, which booted into the default GNOME desktop in a minute or so on my P4, 3.4GHz machine with 1GB of RAM and (512MB) Nvidia GT9500 graphics card.
I've often found Sabayon to be a little garish in the past but S4's new theming is lovely - black, white and blue artwork abounds and it's a very professional look.
For your 2GB download you get a well balanced package selection which, as well as the usual GNOME-centric tools and games, includes:Graphics: Document viewer; F-Spot; GIMP; Image viewer
Internet: aMule; Deluge (torrent); eKiga softphone; Firefox; Network Manager; Pidgin
Office: OpeneOffice.org suite; Evolution
Sound and video: Audacious; dvd:rip; Totem; MPlayer; XBMC (media centre); and Xine.
I found the arrangement of the GNOME menu a little odd: For example, most of the system-level tweaks are in the Preferences menu rather than Administration.
All my resident drives had been detected and were listed under the Places>Removable Media menu, while the subsequent addition of a USB memory stick required me to mount it manually through a panel icon.My wired broadband connection was preconfigured, which is pretty much standard for all distros these days.
I found the live DVD surprisingly snappy in its performance; it actually opened applications quicker than many live CDs I have used.
Before proceeding to a full install, I wanted to take a quick look at Xbox Media Centre, this being my first encounter with it. I have to say it probably won't be my last because it's mightily impressive.
(Note: This screengrab is not my own but it is representative of my experience with XBMC)Bearing in mind that the live DVD was reading various multimedia files from a USB pendrive, I was very pleasantly surprised by its performance. The user interface is modern, stylish and well organised.
Click on any section and you are taken to a browser from which you choose your media source. Each section has a huge range of configuration options and you proceed through the various menus with a left (forward) or right (back) mouse click.
I'm extremely impressed at how well the Sabayon team have incorporated XBMC into their distribution. It played all my videos, MP3s and a slideshow of JPEGs without a hitch and was intuitive to use.
S4 Lite is one of the increasing number of multimedia-friendly distributions which comes with all the codecs necessary to play most kinds of files: Apple movie trailers played in Firefox, BBC iPlayer streams played, YouTube videos, MP3s, .AVI movies, commercial DVDs, etc.
There's little point, in my opinion, having a media centre on a live DVD and only ever using it in live mode - you always need two drives to play things, for a start - and that brings me to installing S4 Lite MCE.
Having rebooted, this time I chose option 7, a graphical installation without 3D support (I'm just not a 3D/Compiz fan, sorry) and a reasonably trouble-free installation.
Sabayon's installer is good, but I wouldn't say it is the best I've used mainly because there's a point at which a new Linux user would be unsure how to progress. Let me explain.
Your initial steps cover routine issues such as default language and keyboard selection, then you're asked to choose your desktop environment from three options: GNOME, Fluxbox and Core (server).
Then comes the package selection stage and it's here we find the biggest obstacle for your Linux newbie. The custom package selection stage asks you to choose what you want in, and what you want left out; everything is pre-selected for inclusion so you must actively remove what you don't want.
Remember, there's 2GB of stuff on that DVD, so that makes for a heck of a lot of possibilities for doing something very wrong here.
NEWBIE TIP: Leave everything in - that way you won't break anything.
Next up come Services, with Samba (network sharing) and CUPS (printing) pre-selected, and NFS and Secure Shell also available.
S4 Lite uses the GRUB bootloader, which I chose to install to the Master Boot Record (MBR). S4 Lite was to co-exist alongside my CrunchBang Linux installation, which unfortunately wasn't detected by the installer anad I had to add it manually.
With Networking, Timezone and User/Root configurations done, it was time to hit the button and sit back while the install proceeded... very slowly indeed.
Once it was done I rebooted into the login screen and, oddly, was asked if I wanted to use American English as the default or just for this session - hadn't I already chosen British English during the installation?
This quirk has repeated every single time I have booted into S4 Lite, even though I have repeatedly set the default system language to British English - this kind of thing really annoys me.
A quick check around my installed system revealed that everything appeared to be working as it did in the live DVD, so I set off to tackle the one major area I had so far ignored: software updates and installation.
Before you even launch the Sabayon binary package manager, which is known as Entropy, I strongly recommend you do some reading. The Entropy wiki entry is a good place to start as it contains some basic commands you will find helpful.
The main components of Entropy are Equo (textual) and Spritz (graphical). Both do the same job of searching, installing, updating and removing applications in Sabayon.
Before you can begin doing any of the above, however, you need to synchronise your system with the Sabayon repository - if you don't do this, Spritz won't show any packages at all. Just enter the following simple command:
su (enter your root password)
and then
equo update
Now you will have a full list of applications in Spritz and you can set about updating (I had 22 updates listed) and installing.
Should you still have problems dealing with Entropy, there's a link on your desktop to "GetLiveHelp" for which you will first need to register before you can access the web chat pages.As this was the first time in many months I had used a Gentoo-based distribution, I actually found a lot of my old fears fading away the more I used the Entropy system.
It's a million times better than sitting and watching packages compile from source, a la the purist Gentoo approach, but I'm still not completely convinced it's as friendly a way of maintaining your OS as, say, Ubuntu's automatic updates and Synaptic package manager (and no, I'm not an Ubuntu fanboy!).
I am, however, greatly impressed by this slimmed-down version of Sabayon and by its implementation of Xbox Media Centre.
If you are looking for a Linux distribution to put on one of those stylish, small form factor, media centre PCs in your lounge then Sabayon 4 Lite MCE would serve you very well indeed
Further links
Sabayon forum: http://forum.sabayonlinux.org/
Sabayon wiki: http://wiki.sabayonlinux.org/
9 comments:
wolfden here from SL:
Thanks for the nice review. LiteMCE is my favorite release yet. It just works and we've heard nothing but good reviews of it. Enjoy and thanks once again.
I'm downloading it...looks neat...
Thanks again for a great review.
After finding Parsix from your great review (I am using the new test version and like it very much) I am looking for a new system to try on my main desktop. I have tried the full version of Four in the past but like you, I found it far to bloated to be worth while since I spent more time taking unnecessary software off the system than using it, but I was interested in the system. Let's hope that MCE lite fits the bill!
I am with you on the 3D desktops. Most of the options seem pointless, and accept for amusing yourself and showing off to Windows users, they are really kind of useless. Its just 3D for 3D sake.
It kind of proves that the medium is the message!
Anyway, keep up the good work and thanks for the information and advice.
PirateTux
Thanks once again for your nice review and great prose.
Sabayon 4 Lite MCE would have been a perfect Media Center if they included a TV viewer like TVTime.
Though most of the Compiz Fusion plugins are functionally worthless, there are exceptions such as Scaling and Preview. In the end, it's still a matter of personal preferences.
Hi, Steven, I was wondering how does one edit the master boot record? I run ubuntu 8.10.
thank you, phloid
@ phloid
I assume you mean how do you edit the GRUB boot menu?
The fact that you may be confusing the Master Boot Record and the GRUB boot menu probably means you should do a lot of reading before you decide to try editing anything - and I mean that in the most constructive way possible, honestly, because you could render your PC unusable by doing the wrong thing.
I suggest you Google GRUB to get a better idea of what it is and does.
But the short answer is that it stands for the Grand Unified Bootloader - if you are running Ubuntu, then that's the bootloader you have installed.
Your Ubuntu GRUB is installed into the Master Boot Record - think of the MBR as the first small portion of your hard drive.
It's possible to edit GRUB's configuration file - it's called the menu.lst and can be found in /boot/grub/menu.lst
You can only edit it as root, not as a user, and you need to edit it in whichever text editor you prefer, but let's assume you use gedit.
Launch a terminal, enter 'sudo' (without the quote marks) to get root access, and 'gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst' (again without the quotes) to open menu.lst.
Once you make any changes, make sure to save the file.
As I said, however, I STRONGLY recommend you do a lot of reading about this subject before diving in.
Hope that helped a bit, and good luck
Personally, I heavily prefer portage, mostly because of how I can set it up to do things the way I want. I'm also a fan of bleeding edge software (and hardware), and portage helps in that sense, too.
Just an example: portage contains several different versions of each package. Some are "masked" (considered "unstable", so you have to do extra stuff to install them) so that portage can have newer versions of packages than most other distros. You want stable? You've got it. You want bleeding edge? You've got it. Whatever you want, it takes a small modification of a couple configuration files, and you've got it - all in the same repository.
Waiting for things to compile isn't that big of a deal for me, personally, because I like the way things end up better than the binary way. USE flags are a good way of building your system around the packages that you want.
However, this goes back to the "Chaos vs. Order, Complexity vs. Simplicity" type thing. I love being able to do exactly what I want, exactly how I want, but I can understand when the choice can be too much for people.
Anyway, all that said: I use Sabayon, but the first few things I do when it's installed are to edit the make.conf file (which you're technically not supposed to do, but meh), add some overlays using layman, install portage (using emerge --sync), and throw together my own gentoo-based kernel (which cuts boot time down by at least half). I don't bother to use entropy most of the time, but I keep it installed for when I need to help friends who have installed Sabayon at my recommendation.
@ Valczir - you sound like a very knowledgeable, very experienced Linux and Gentoo/Sabayon user.
I'm pleased someone with lots of Gentoo/Sabayon experience has commented because it shows the other side of the argument.
You're quite right that having such a large degree of control over what your PC does is appealing, especially if you don't mind those long, long, l-o-n-g compile times!
But me? I'm in too much of a hurry! My bad!
@Steven:
Actually, compile times are rarely long, at least for me. Granted, I have an AMD Phenom II x4 940 BE (remember what I said about bleeding edge?), so that may be helping things along. Still, even back when I had a single core Opteron, compile times would rarely extend beyond five or ten minutes, including all dependencies. The only times when that statement wouldn't hold up were when I'd install, say, amarok when I wasn't using any other KDE apps - pulling in that many dependencies will take forever on any distro, using any package manager, and having to compile everything would naturally make it take longer.
Anyway, with Sabayon, I would suggest that you install portage even though you don't like compiling things - portage has MANY more packages than entropy, and entropy and portage sync with each other (they keep a common installed package database and install log). That way, if you're looking for some program and can't find it in entropy, you can search for it in portage.
If you want to install portage, open up portato and either hit ctrl+s or open the "Emerge" menu and click on "Sync". You'll find it helpful if you ever run into a case where you can't find a program you want in entropy.
Also, you may want to add the "sunrise" overlay, because that overlay contains ebuilds from normal gentoo users (devs don't have to approve submissions to sunrise), meaning that there are tons more packages in that overlay. If you can't find something in portage, it's almost guaranteed to be in sunrise. To add the sunrise overlay:
# sudo layman -a sunrise
And to sync all layman overlays (you can add this to the sync command for portato, if you want; just change the sync command from "emerge --sync" to "layman -S && emerge --sync"):
# sudo layman -S
Granted, you may never use them, but it might be nice to have everything prepared just in case you ever want/need to. Installing portage takes a while, and installing the sunrise overlay isn't too short, either.
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