recommendation: sabayon linux

[urlwolf]

I moved to full-time linux (yet again) ~ 2 months ago, and of course went for ubuntu.
But somehow, ubuntu didn't like my lappy. It didn't unmount the filesystem right, and fsck stopped being able to fix it.

All cues pointed at faulty hardware.

However, another distro wouldn't hurt before buying a new HD.
I tried sabayon linux because I didn't want a debian derivative, which may carry the same error.
It's based on gentoo, but with binaries.

see:
http://sabayon.org
http://forum.sabayon.org/index.php

The sabayon linux live CD picked everything right, with latest version of nvidia drivers.
It operates fine on the supposedly faulty HD. My guess: ubuntu unmount scripts are not that good.

Main advantages over ubuntu:

• rolling release
• more up-to-date packages
• better settings by default
• equo package manager is way better than apt-get
• killer communuty of very advanced and helpful users

[Stoic Joker]

Granted my Slackware project kinda hit the wall, but this looks interesting. I'm grabbing the Sabayon_Linux_CoreCD_5.1_x86.iso off one of the FTPs - Hope that's the right file (eek).

[Stoic Joker]

Well... CoreCD was Wrong Option - Assuming one was looking for a GUI - and I was. (Dohi)

CoreCD CLI install went fine ... Right up until I got to the no desktop. Which proved un-fulfilling rather quickly...

Currently trying the Sabayon KDE - GUI Install locked up 4 times so I'm trying the Text Based install in the (possibly foolish) hopes for a different outcome. The installation is not fast - not even a little - I'm at 15%

*Sigh* ...There is nothing on TV...

16%

[Stoic Joker]

Install finished (Finally) Desktop=none  ..."Install" however did say something about removing it toward the end (error message might have been nice...). And the user account it insisted I create Does-Not-Work (*Joy*).

Open your source - Open your mind - Open your butt cheeks ... When will I learn...

[Shades]

You forgot about the sandpaper...


Three years or so I tried Gentoo...took a full 48 hours to install but that was more than likely the fault of the internet connection I could get at the time. In theory it should get you the best (read: optimized and speed) Linux for the PC you are installing it on. In practice a sandpaper experience...coarse sandpaper at that.

[f0dder]

Shades: the speed advantage of compiling-for-your-architecture of gentoo hasn't been very large in my experience - and iirc there were some benchmarks showing that for some people (and some compiler options) the system even got slightly slower than "vanilla" binaries. Kinda makes sense, most applications aren't CPU-heavy and thus don't benefit from aggressive optimizations; au contraire, some of those bloat up the binaries, so you end up with fatter and ever-so-slighty slower-loading more-memory-consuming without much advantage.

I use gentoo on my server, though - I like the level of control it gives me over what dependencies are pulled in. Vanilla binaries tend to be built with all options supported - this often includes (optional) X11 support... I don't need and don't want X11 on my server, and gentoo let's me achieve this.

For the desktop, I prefer something smoother and more polished... but that's why I don't run Linux on the desktop in the first place

[urlwolf]

linux for the laptop is even worse. Since I put it on mine:

• I had to reinstall the OS (ubuntu) 4 times, as decribed above
• I had to google a lot. and spent about 16hrs on diff irc channels
• Had to forget that modern laptops should know how to hibernate
• plugging a external screen or projector is an excercise in sysadmin-fu
• cannot connect to PPPoE
• I actually broke sabayon package manager. Got help in IRC, but these things should not happen. ever.
• Had to dedicate 25% of my brain CPU to think what to do and not to do to have a stable, sane system.
• The natural state of a linux system is broken. If it's not broken, just wait till the next batch of updates...

I'm still sticking to it though... when my list of annoyances reaches a page-long, I wil abandon it yet again.

[scancode]

My experience with Ubuntu/LinuxMint on my netbook.

• Everything worked out-of-the-box
• Mixxx crashed my computer. Every time. Back to Windows.

[f0dder]

• I had to google a lot. and spent about 16hrs on diff irc channels

How many times were you told to RTFM, "fix it, you have the source", or were otherwise mocked?

(My experiences with linux IRC rooms have been less-than-stellar; but I guess it might help to join freenode/whatever linux channels and not EFNet )

[scancode]

How many times were you told to RTFM, "fix it, you have the source", or were otherwise mocked?

(My experiences with linux IRC rooms have been less-than-stellar; but I guess it might help to join freenode/whatever linux channels and not EFNet )

My experience with linux channels was simply people pretending I was invisible. For hours. Even asking smart questions in a smart way. 

[Stoic Joker]

linux for the laptop is even worse. Since I put it on mine:

• I had to reinstall the OS (ubuntu) 4 times, as decribed above
• I had to google a lot. and spent about 16hrs on diff irc channels
• Had to forget that modern laptops should know how to hibernate
• plugging a external screen or projector is an excercise in sysadmin-fu
• cannot connect to PPPoE
• I actually broke sabayon package manager. Got help in IRC, but these things should not happen. ever.
• Had to dedicate 25% of my brain CPU to think what to do and not to do to have a stable, sane system.
• The natural state of a linux system is broken. If it's not broken, just wait till the next batch of updates...

I'm still sticking to it though... when my list of annoyances reaches a page-long, I wil abandon it yet again.

...And after all that, you still come here and recommend the damn thing why? Just to see if some jackass will fall for it?

Mom was right, missery does love company...



@Shades - I stand corrected...Sorry...Won't happen again.

[Stoic Joker]

But seriously... I dug out my notes on the Slackware fiasco and found the VPC video fix that allowed Slackware to load the desktop. I'll try adding that to sabayon before the install to see if I can earn the privilege of having a desktop using that as an offering.

What I'd really like to fine is a completely stripped down (CLI only) *nix variant that will run (or rather come with) a Samba server for file sharing.

[f0dder]

What I'd really like to fine is a completely stripped down (CLI only) *nix variant that will run (or rather come with) a Samba server for file sharing.

Gentoo, perhaps Arch?

I used Arch before going gentoo, and it was pretty nice - but it felt a bit too "fringe", I had a feeling of not knowing whether the distro would be supported 12 months later... and some of the software I wanted wasn't available in the package system so I had to compile it myself.

[Stoic Joker]

Still trying to navigate the maze of config files ... Does *nix have anything like DOSShell that would allow me to graphically view the file system without having a full desktop?

[urlwolf]

I've never gotten a RTFM on #sabayon irc, nor being ignored.
This is why I mentioned community as an advantage.

I agree with most windows problems posted here:
http://mssaleh.wordpress.com/2008/04/14/11/

and this is why I think it's worth it to keep plugging.
At some point, things may just work with minimal maintenance. Faster filesystems is another virtue. Yet another, most of the software I use is OSS, and it just works better on linux (example R, python). Your reasons may be different.

[Stoic Joker]

Well at this point, in a choice between sabayon & Slackware, Slackware wins. At least it would give meaningful error messages that could be analyzed, addressed, resolved, and allowed me to get to a desktop (so I had a point to work from). I rather dislike guessing games.

Only problems I have with the Slackware 12 install is shutdown is frequently just a scheduled crash and the sound does not work. I'm not adverse to *nix, I just don't think it's ready for prime-time desktop-wise that is. I really don't have the time or patience to dedicate my life to finding out how to make a hardware change smoothly because somebody thinks it's a H00T to have to re-write parts of the OS every time the neighbors cat blinks.

So.. At this point I'm going to torch the sabayon experiment & take a stab at f0dder's Arch suggestion.

[Shades]

Shades: the speed advantage of compiling-for-your-architecture of gentoo hasn't been very large in my experience - and iirc there were some benchmarks showing that for some people (and some compiler options) the system even got slightly slower than "vanilla" binaries. Kinda makes sense, most applications aren't CPU-heavy and thus don't benefit from aggressive optimizations; au contraire, some of those bloat up the binaries, so you end up with fatter and ever-so-slighty slower-loading more-memory-consuming without much advantage.

I use gentoo on my server, though - I like the level of control it gives me over what dependencies are pulled in. Vanilla binaries tend to be built with all options supported - this often includes (optional) X11 support... I don't need and don't want X11 on my server, and gentoo let's me achieve this.

For the desktop, I prefer something smoother and more polished... but that's why I don't run Linux on the desktop in the first place

For 3 months now my servers are running on Ubuntu 9.04 Server, I have to say that the distro is very smooth and stable in operation. So I do agree with you about "vanilla" distro's and from other personal experience I can say that compiling any distro for your hardware results in an extremely stable OS. It was RedHat on a 486, its task was to register traffic for some 50 domains (including several p*rn sites) and generate web statistics for those customers and our billing department. Running 4 years straight and was then turned off because it had to move to a different office building. Ah, compared with my (celeron 300MHz) Win98 desktop at the time it was a relief to work with that PC.

Thank you f0dder for making me remember  

[Josh]

You mean Windows 9x where you had to reinstall every few months just because things got too slow? Now who wouldn't love that!

</sarcasm>

[f0dder]

Faster filesystems is another virtue.

How much faster are those filesystems than NTFS for "normal" use, though? It's pretty hard to come up with a benchmark, considering that only ext2 is available for NT and that the NTFS support in linux can not be compared to native windows speed (neither the current ntfs3g nor the old wrapper around binary NT drivers). Yes, I know that some of the filesystems are theoretically better, but outside insane practices like putting 20k files in a single folder, can you feel the difference? (explorer.exe is dog slow with large folders, but that's because of explorer and icon extraction, not because of NTFS).

Also, most of the newer filesystems on linux (those actually offering performance benefits) can't yet be considered as mature as NTFS... there's plenty of ReiserFS horror stories around. EXT2 might or might not be faster, but it doesn't have journaling - EXT3 w/journaling should be stable, but I haven't tested it's speed... and really, for normal desktop/workstation use, I don't think I've ever bumped into a filesystem bottleneck.

One of the few reasons where I can see the filesystem make a big difference (apart from data security differences or managing features, like über-cool ZFS has) would be mail servers storing email in Maildir format (which is superior to mbox)... but for most other stuff I don't believe in having a zillion folders or files inside a folder . That said, I wouldn't mind more filesystems being available for Windows; NTFS is decent, but I'd like the data-safety features of ZFS, and I wouldn't mind seeing proper head-to-head benchmarks, even if synthetics don't have much to do with desktop/workstation patterns.

You mean Windows 9x where you had to reinstall every few months just because things got too slow? Now who wouldn't love that!

Never really happened to me - when I needed a reinstall it was because I hosed my system, which was ever so easier on 9x than NT because of the lack of protection (user permissions as well as memory - having all DLLs in shared writable memory is bad). Back then it did mean a measurable performance difference to clean & compact your registry, though

[Gothi[c]]

for most other stuff I don't believe in having a zillion folders or files inside a folder

You should see the donationcoder smf attachments/uploads folder

[f0dder]

link=topic=21317.msg191469#msg191469 date=1263148121]

for most other stuff I don't believe in having a zillion folders or files inside a folder

You should see the donationcoder smf attachments/uploads folder

Caching http proxies can also produce craploads of files. If I was designing a system with such properties, I'd introduce a level or two of subfolders, to have "somewhat more sane" number of files in each folder. Squid, for instance, does this. Can't be done for Maildir, though