I definitely want to give Sabayon another try. The LXDE spin grew a little buggy over time, but I wonder if that’s because it wasn’t a fully supported desktop environment.
Tag: sabayon

The Linux Setup – Ruji Chapnik, Artist
I noticed Ruji in the March 2012 edition of Linux Journal, where she wrote a cool article about playing and managing music from the console. Having interviewed her, I can say my instinct that she would be interesting was spot-on—Ruji runs Sabayon Xfce, a setup I myself enjoyed for a while.
You can find more of The Linux Setup here.
You can follow Linux Rig on Google+ here and follow me on Twitter here.
- Who are you, and what do you do?
I’m Ruji Chapnik. I’m a freelancer and Linux hobbyist. As far as what I “do” goes, I suppose you could call me an artist; I have a bachelor’s degree in art, anyway. Lately I’ve been posting satirical comics at dondepresso.tumblr.com. You can find out more about me at rujic.net.
- What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?
I have two laptops, a 13" MacBook Pro and a Lenovo G770. Both are running Sabayon Linux. Both are also set up to dual-boot, but I rarely use Windows on my Lenovo. I do use Mac OS X for Final Cut Pro, which is my go-to nonlinear video editing program.
- What software do you depend upon with this distribution?
I’ve played with different desktop environments and have settled with Xfce on both systems. I used Gnome 2 in the past and switched to KDE for a long while last year, but later I wanted something zippier.
Some of the software I find essential for daily use
- Terminator: The best terminal emulator in the world. I’m addicted to making little boxes inside it.
- GIMP: Needs no introduction.
- gedit: I use it for all my notes. Sometimes I use different highlight modes to organize my thoughts; for instance, in C++ mode, my numbered lists show up in color. I don’t actually edit code in gedit.
- DeaDBeeF: I just started using this music player when I was getting annoyed with Amarok’s interface. I customized the colors of the GUI and made it look all psychedelic and crazy and stuff.
- Xfrun4: Yep, that’s right. The popup “run” dialog. I’ve customized my keyboard shortcuts so that hitting CTRL+SPACE opens Xfrun4. This saves me a lot of time when opening applications.
- What kind of hardware do you run it on?
MacBook Pro 5,5 (13") with 4GB RAM and 2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. Lenovo G770 (17.3") with 8GB RAM and 2.50 GHz Intel Core i5-2450M processor.
- What is your ideal Linux setup?
The most comfortable setup I’ve had was a year or two ago, when I was running Sabayon Linux on my MacBook Pro with Gnome 2. I used Compiz Fusion as my window manager, which was awesome. I set it up to do all kinds of neat 3D tricks when I moved windows or switched workplaces.
Running Linux on a Mac can be a pain in the ass when it comes to using the iSight camera and playing audio; Mac hardware often doesn’t play nicely with Linux. I haven’t had these problems with Linux on my Lenovo. It was such a relief that I didn’t have to tweak the hell out of my ALSA settings to get the audio working.
The setup on my Lenovo is pretty close to ideal, but I miss some things about Gnome 2. I don’t want to use an obsolete desktop environment, though, and I don’t care much for Gnome 3—so the best thing seems to be Xfce. At some point when I’m not feeling lazy, I’ll install CairoDock, which I prefer to Xfce’s built-in toolbars.
- Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?
Interview conducted March 25, 2012
The Linux Setup is a feature where I interview people about their Linux setups. The concept is borrowed, if not outright stolen, from this site. If you’d like to participate, drop me a line.
You can follow Linux Rig on Google+ here, follow me on Twitter here, and subscribe to the feed here.

The Linux Setup – Fabio Erculiani, Sabayon Linux
Fabio Erculiani is the man behind Sabayon Linux, a fantastic, rolling distribution based upon Gentoo (but much easier to manage). My thoughts on Sabayon are here. Fabio does a lot of different things on Sabayon, from the desktop to the server level. You have to appreciate a person that eats his own cooking.
You can find more of The Linux Setup here.
You can follow Linux Rig on Google+ here and follow me on Twitter here.
- Who are you, and what do you do?
I’m Fabio Erculiani, the founder and leader of Sabayon Linux. But I’m also a computer scientist and freelance software engineer (I speak any language) with a strong background in Linux environments.
- What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?
My main desktop is running Sabayon.
My laptop is running, surprise surprise, Sabayon.
My home server is running Sabayon.
Our infra servers are running Sabayon.
Did I mention Sabayon? - What software do you depend upon with this distribution?
Mainly GNOME, screen, and gnome-terminal 😉
Besides those, I use what anybody else would use: LibreOffice, Chromium as web browser (<3!), etc… - What kind of hardware do you run it on?
Let’s see, my current desktop PC is composed of:
Case Coolermaster Cosmos (super silent)
Intel Core i5 750
8GB RAM DDR3
750GB RAID1 array
Nvidia GeForce GTX465 from Point of View
Two Samsung 20" LCD screensMy laptop is a simple 13" MacBook, late 2008, with 500GB HD and 6GB RAM.
- What is your ideal Linux setup?
GNOME, Nvidia GPUs, and multi-monitor. Last but not least, a gazillion GBs of RAM.
- Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?
My desktop is a default Sabayon desktop. The same you can find on Sabayon Live images.
Interview conducted August 15, 2011
The Linux Setup is a feature where I interview people about their Linux setups. The concept is borrowed, if not outright stolen, from this site. If you’d like to participate, drop me a line.
You can follow Linux Rig on Google+ here, follow me on Twitter here, and subscribe to the feed here.
LXDE: blank icon added on notification area after resume since ugrade – Ubuntu Forums
This is actually an LXDE issue that I see in Sabayon, also. It’s hardly a dealbreaker, but it can be surprisingly distracting. The lxpanelctl restart is a quick and easy way to get rid of it when it gets on my nerves.
LXDE: blank icon added on notification area after resume since ugrade – Ubuntu Forums
Updating Your Kernel in Sabayon
I didn’t realize that while Sabayon is a rolling distribution, the kernel needs to be manually updated (disturbingly, more and more of my knowledge seems to be coming from reddit…).
I decided to update my kernel today because suspend has never worked on my T420 and I figured a kernel upgrade would do the trick.
It actually wasn’t too bad. Sabayon has a built-in kernel upgrade tool. Details on it can be found here. This post has the easiest-to-understand (for me) command syntax: kernel-switcher switch sys-kernel/linux-sabayon-3.0-r10.
I ran the update, checked everything, and it worked. And now I can suspend!
I’m not sure I’ll ever upgrade the kernel again.
Getting Beautiful Fonts in Gentoo Linux | Kev009.com
This guide is brilliant. I wasn’t loving the font rendering in Sabayon, but this has made a huge, huge difference.

A Review and Endorsement of Sabayon LXDE
So I recently discussed my move to Lubuntu on my new ThinkPad.
Before moving to Lubuntu, I briefly gave Sabayon Xfce a spin. It was interesting, but there was a little bit more of a learning curve than I was prepared to commit to at the time.
But once I had my new machine working, I decided to try out Sabayon on the old one, a ThinkPad T43. Since I’ve fallen in love with LXDE as a desktop environment, I wanted to see Sabayon’s take on it. I liked it so much on the T43, I wound up installing it on the T420, my everyday laptop.
Sabayon is an intriguing distro. It’s based on Gentoo, but is much more user-friendly. From what I understand, a lot of Gentoo packages need to be manually compiled. Sabayon includes a standard package manager with a very nice selection of software. Adding and removing software is pretty ordinary, once you’ve played with Entropy, the package manager, for a little bit. I also found the advanced interface a little easier to use, since that gives you the option of searching the repositories or your installed programs.
The Sabayon LXDE default applications are fairly vanilla. I immediately added gedit, Chromium, Firefox, and GIMP. I also installed the xfce4-appfinder, which I use as an application launcher. I was also going to install Clipman as my clipboard manager, when I noticed Parcellite in the repositories. It’s comparable to Clipman and seemed to have less dependencies.
There’s also some kind of issue with the GNOME keyring and Network Manager, where every login also requires you to authenticate the keyring before Network Manager will connect. It was annoying more than anything, so I removed Network Manager and swapped in Wicd, a very nice and very underrated network manager.
The default Sabayon LXDE icons weren’t great, so I popped in Lubuntu’s. And since Lubuntu doesn’t have Wicd art, I replaced the Wicd icons with the Lubuntu Network Manager ones, which just involved messing about with /usr/share/pixmaps/wicd and changing some file names. It’s silly, but I really like the Lubuntu wifi indicators.
I was able to get the ThinkPad trackpad scroll working relatively easily, once I figured out what most other distros call .xsessionrc is .xprofile in Gentoo/Sabayon.
Wireless printing was also effortless to implement.
Sabayon is solid. It needed some work to perfect, but once I set up some Openbox key launchers (I’ve become very dependent upon Ctrl-Alt-T to launch a terminal Ctrl-Alt-E to open the file manager — the T43 lacks a Windows/super key), it began to feel comfortable.
Entropy has a nice selection of programs, which I appreciate since I’m not huge on compiling my own packages (and the Sabayon documentation kind of warns new users off of doing so). I was able to find SpiderOak, my new backup tool, in the repositories, but they also have packages for DropBox.
Because Sabayon is a rolling distribution, there are also, as one might expect, very up-to-date packages available, like the new version of GIMP that includes single window mode. Closing GIMP no longer feels like Whac-a-Mole and has probably added hours of free time to my year.
It’s still early, but so far, Sabayon has been relatively stable. It doesn’t have the out-of-the-box beauty and seamlessness of Lubuntu, but using Lubuntu as a template, I’ve been able to give Sabayon that same kind of ease and convenience. But there are some issues. Suspend doesn’t work on the T420, although it was fine on the T43. gedit is also a little buggy. There seems to be an issue with the snippets plugin that’s causing some crashing.
Sabayon comes with a few desktop environment options. There’s KDE, GNOME, Xfce and Enlightenment versions. I wasn’t a huge fan of the Xfce version, but I think that might have had more to do with Xfce 4.8 than Sabayon’s implementation.
Finally, a note about support. Sabayon has a forums area, but it’s not the same volume of answers as you’ll find with a Debian-based distribution. Google seems to know to direct Sabayon queries to Gentoo areas, and a lot of times, the answer you need can be found in the Gentoo forums, which seem a little busier than the Sabayon ones. Online Linux help tends to skew Ubuntu-related, so troubleshooting can take a little longer than you might be used to. The answers are out there, but they’re not as readily available as the Ubuntu-related ones.
But Sabayon is well-worth the extra effort. Especially given that it’s a rolling distribution, meaning all of my hard work configuring things won’t have to be re-done in a few years. Ubuntu-derived distributions are great. They usually work out of the box and a lot of thought goes into the UI (whether you personally agree with the thoughts or not). The tradeoff is that the distributions can often feel a little bloated, and sometimes it can be hard to track down what part of Ubuntu is controlling what. Sabayon is a nice halfway point between the ease of Ubuntu and the full-on control-every-aspect-of-your-distro experience of something like Arch.
So far, it’s been great for someone likes me, who likes to play with his OS, but doesn’t want it to be his full-time job.
REVIEW: Sabayon 6 (Xfce) and a look at my migration away from Gnome. « OpenBytes
A nice review of Sabayon, a distribution I’m coming to realize is very underrated. I’ll have my own review eventually, but I’m really, really enjoying it.
REVIEW: Sabayon 6 (Xfce) and a look at my migration away from Gnome. « OpenBytes