the new addition

After checking out the live session a little bit, I installed Sabayon 9 KDE in a multi-boot set-up with three other Linux distros, on my notebook. The installer seemed clear and sensible; the one thing that struck me as odd was the dig at Debian Stable in the slideshow that runs during the installation ("debian stable? pfft! OLD!!").

I spent some time looking over Sabayon's wiki, which has plenty of good and important information, especially for someone like me who is brand new to Sabayon. Its "Introduction" section includes installation instructions and info on what to do with a fresh installation, like how to get the system completely up-to-date using the Entropy package manager, with equo commands from the command line. A separate section of the wiki provides more info on Entropy. Here's a link to the Sabayon wiki.

Once I made sure the system was up-to-date, I customized things to my tastes:

It seemed like a good idea for me to get used to running the Entropy package manager from the command line, but I wanted to at least take a look at Rigo, Entropy's new GUI front-end. When you first start Rigo up, you see that they use it to send information notices, which strikes me as a very nice touch:

You can search for applications by name, or by category, and then install what you want.

There's a notification applet on the panel that tells you when updates become available. Now that my system is up-to-date, here's what it looks like when I right-click on the applet:

Clicking on "Use Packages web interface" opens up Chromium and takes you to http://packages.sabayon.org/. where you can get more info about what's available. Looks good.

For now, I think I'll stick with using Entropy from the command line.

The distro looks like it's put together well. Its desktop strikes me as being perhaps the most beautiful one I've seen. The documentation seems good and the system seems stable.  Sabayon 9 KDE seems quite fast and responsive, although updating and installing packages seems to take a long time. I mentioned a few reviews of this release in my blog post yesterday, and those would provide more detailed info than I would, but I will say that Sabayon looks like a very pleasant Linux distribution, and one that I hope to be running here for a very long time.