I finally decided to try out linux on the laptop again, a project that was once a daunting task due to the wireless networking chip HP decided to use in this box. I was pleasantly surprised when i booted the Sabayon linux live disc in and on boot it found my network card and video card and had everything setup waiting for a key to access the network. Pretty smooth, and I did like the beryl features too, so I went ahead and installed it to the laptop, nuking the windows install I had labored so long to make almost perfect.

Installing sabayon was easy and I was actually able to install it on the laptop while I was driving home… as once you enter some key information, it does its thing until you’re ready to reboot. By the time I had picked the girls up from day care and gotten them all inside the house, the system was ready to reboot.

The machine boots about as fast as it does in windows, which is ok, I don’t need speed on boot (as I very rarely turn the system off) and the default WM is KDE with beryl. Which is ok too, I guess. I’ve always been somewhat of a Gnome fan, however, the recent switch of slackware going KDE only and the more recent stuff with Linus and the Gnome team left me with questions. I’ve found, in the week that I’ve been using it, its very similar to Windows in the way it does things and handles menus, and the new kicker is cool too.

Sabayon is not a distribution for those who like to go minimal. It is a Gentoo Stage 3 install on Steroids, and it comes with several versions of software that do the same thing (something like 6 videos players?!?!?!) however, if you have a beefy system and want something that looks classy, then its a good fit. I have had some problems with some of the software not playing nicely, firefox for one, which was stable as anything on the windows install has crashed on me several times when it comes up against embedded media that it can’t handle (I admit, this might not be a fault of Sabayon so much as firefox) and the lack of a really decent MS Exchange friendly mail client (yea, there’s evolution, but come on…..) has led me to throw together a windows xp box to use on my desktop for email (the company uses exchange…) and browsing trouble sites…

Over all, the distro is good, and probably stable enough for the average user, the polish is there, I would say that sabayon just needs to work on the stuff under the hood for the next major release. 3.3 is due out some time with in the next month or so. Below is a video of my desktop in action…. it didn’t come out as good as I wanted, but I think its not bad for a first time….