Adventures with Sabayon Linux

Despite having issues using Sabayon Linux on a USB stick with persistent storage (unable to install packages), I was so impressed by its speed that I decided to go ahead and install it. Surprisingly I have found that most of the software I use is already included, including Gnome Tweak Tool. So far I have just had to make a few adjustments:

Banshee for my music player SMPlayer for my movie player Gnome Shell extensions Parcellite clipboard manager since the GPaste extension is not readily available (more on this later) Htop process manager That’s all I can think of.

I have a few problems going on right now in Sabayon. First and foremost the GPaste Gnome Shell extension is in ebuild format and I can’t figure out how to install it (yes, I read the man pages, but I get errors every time I try something with it). The forums have proven to be useless so far, as has the IRC channel. I don’t know if I’m being a “dumb noob” or if it’s just too complicated for anyone to walk me through it.

My second issue in Sabayon has been uninstalling software. The graphical package manager seems to only be able to install software, not uninstall it. Of course I went to the man page for Portage and was not able to find any options for uninstalling software besides one command that warns it may uninstall necessary dependencies also without any warning. Portage and Ebuild just may turn out to be the reasons I go back to Fedora.

Never to fear at this point though. I have what I need and that’s enough for me for now.

There is a certain kind of relief that goes with installing a rolling release distribution. Ahhh, I never have to do that again if I don’t want to.

I’ve been blissfully set free from the bugs in Fedora 16 also. Except for one that still plagues me, and it has to do with Gnome. When using any theme other than the default Adawaita theme, searching in the Activities menu freezes Gnome Shell. I have to drop down in to another terminal and kill the process for it to be up and running again. Quite annoying and I hope something is done about it soon, because Adawaita just takes up too much screen real estate for me to use it.

I also seem to be missing the Bogofilter plugin for Evolution. Bogofilter is installed but its plugin is nowhere to be seen.

Still, despite the problems, I am finding myself quite liking Sabayon. It may stay on my machine for a while to come.

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