Sabayon 7 Brings Linux Heaven

by Susan Linton - Oct. 13, 2011Comments (4)

sabayon Sabayon 7 was recently released bringing lots of updates and improvements. The announcement said, "If you really enjoyed Sabayon 6, this will be even more fun and cute. There you have it, shining at full bright, for your home computer, your laptop and your home servers." This Gentoo-based everything-but-the-kitchen-sink distro is maturing like the proverbial bottle of wine. It's getting smooooth.

Highlights this release include:

● Optimized Linux Kernel 3.0

● Native btrfs support

● GNOME 3.2.0

● KDE 4.7.1

● Customized Xfce 4.8

● LibreOffice 3.4.3

● Semi-automated package updates

● An optional Fusion Kernel

The new Fusion Kernel is explained by Michael Larabel as, "a new effort led by the few Sabayon developers and it's aim is to be similar to the Zen Linux kernel sources. The Fusion kernel is supposed to be a "Sabayon-flavoured Linux kernel sources on steroids." Among its features are integration of the Brain Fuck Scheduler (BFS), the BFQ I/O scheduler, Reiser4 file-system support, experimental Btrfs patches, experimental DRM patches, and new wireless-next drivers."

For me this release is a bit bittersweet. In Sabayon's early days I looked forward to the new releases because my current system at the time would most likely be acting up and needing a reinstall. Then later on it became more stable and I began applying updates and enjoying the rolling update aspect - so, as fresh installs grew less necessary new releases became less important.

But for those needing a new or fresh install, Sabayon 7 comes in live DVD versions for KDE and GNOME as well as 32-bit and 64-bit. Developers said they've spruced Xfce up this release so I was anxious to see that. They were having a bit of a difficulty with GNOME 3.x there for a while, but I guess they worked it out. Fabio Erculiani said, "During this cycle, the development team spent a lot of time on integrating GNOME 3.2 the way users might actually start to love it."

Isn't that the same wallpaper from Sabayon 6?

Linuxbsdos.com has screenshots of the GNOME 3.2 and KDE Plasma desktops.

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by an anonymous user on Oct. 13, 2011

Gave the x64 G a try on my desktop. It was very buggy on first boot, seeing a lot of glitches in gnome. After first restart the system failed to load Gnome. Not really a huge fan of KDE but I might make an exception on this release just to test 4.7 out. Then again, I enjoy Chakra for KDE. Would really liked to give this system a better test. =[

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by Barnaby on Oct. 17, 2011

Sabayon is still far from stable. I hate to spam the comments but this happened to me not even two weeks ago in S6 (http://all-things-linux.blogspot.com/2011/10/sabayon-6-fscked-my-home-xf...).

I´m not looking forward to trying Sabayon again. It will likely be a few years if at all.

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by Harold on Oct. 17, 2011

I've been using Sabayon since version 4.0, when it was the first distro I found that properly handled the Nvidia card on my HP laptop. Since then I have tried most of the releases while also using other distros. But with 7.0 I think I'm home to stay. The installation of the 32 bit system on my quad core desktop machine was probably the smoothest installation (of hundreds) I've ever done.

My only issue is why Sabayon fails to give users a choice on which version of Gnome we prefer. The provided Gnome 3.2 is miles behind the usability of Gnome 2.30. Mint is gathering lots of users just providing the superior older version. Sabayon could do the same.

Mostly however, I'm using KDE and Fluxbox. Sabayon seems distinctly better and faster at these standards than their competition. Also both command line equo and graphic Sulfur package installers seem to work better than ever.

Linux Heaven indeed.

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by Harold on Oct. 17, 2011

Linux Heaven indeed.

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