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Sabayon's Fabio Erculiani: "Users first and choice makes the tasty dessert among the distro's"

Posted by hkwint on · 16 comments
LXer.com; By H.Kwint, the Netherlands 		Mail this story
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LXer Feature: 31-May-2007

After a month of absence I visited Distrowatch again, and found out I definitely missed something. A new Gentoo-based almost Ubuntu-like* distribution - called Sabayon (an Italian dessert) Linux - seemed to have appeared almost out of nowhere recently including a full-blown portal website. This is even more true if you know Sabayon Linux only has three main developers.

"Let's give this a spin" I thought, and I was stunned: "How did these developers make the most progressive but still stable desktop I have ever seen, with out-of-the-box 3D-desktop experience and tons of applications - all fitting on a LiveDVD?"
Soon, the distribution reached its preliminary goal of surpassing Gentoo at Distrowatch and became the fastest growing distribution of the last few months. To those who don't know Sabayon Linux yet, I'd say: "If less is more, than Sabayon Linux is most at least".

So far so good, you may think, but Sabayon Linux' main developer - Fabio Erculiani - sees an even bigger future for Sabayon Linux, after funding issues are resolved. Time to find out who are behind this user-oriented distribution.

[*In my opinion it's better, but to those who haven't tried Sabayon Linux yet, think Ubuntu, but more complete and more progressive - hkwint]

Sabayon Linux logo

LXer: Can you introduce yourself ? What is your education, and what are your hobbies (if there is any time left), except for developing Sabayon? How and when did you start to use (Gentoo) Linux, and how did somebody of your age (I understand you're 21, which seems rather young for a distribution developer) become the lead developer of one of the most popular distributions of today? Do you feel your age a pro or a con, or doesn't it matter?

Photograph of Fabio Erculiani Fabio Erculiani:

  • Name: Fabio Erculiani
  • Date of birth: 15 November 1985
  • Employment: Sabayon Linux Project Leader + *nix Consultant
  • Education: Electronics and Telecommunications Diploma, some Cambridge University English Certificates and the hope to find the time to go to the University
  • Hobbies: Science in general, even if I like astronomy and physics more. I started to play with Linux when I was 14, I fell in love when I was 16 and I started RR4 when I was 18.
About my age, good question, it's a pro for me, but a con when I deal with other people or Company managers. Another issue is that I'm not graduate yet. But there are a lot of graduate people that are much more stupid than me. For the Google generation, being graduate is less important than in the past. I have three cerebral hemispheres, left, right and Google.

LXer: Congratulations with reaching the goal Sabayon Linux set for itself of reaching the top ten at Distrowatch. Sabayon is even higher than Gentoo these days. Our Sabayon Linux 3.26 bit torrent was uploaded 40 times in about two weeks, using almost all our upload speed, including some time after 3.3 was released. What's your explanation of this success? What is the general feedback to Sabayon Linux from the users?



Fabio Erculiani:
Hi Hans, I'm glad to answer your questions and I hope that also your readers will be. There is no secret. Just two small but true realities:

  1. Vision: this pushes the roadmap concept to the past. Sabayon Linux does not have pre-established roadmaps, doing a distribution is not a peace plan. You never know what would happen the next month, you can't know if people will like your strategy, your features plan, your ideas. So we must keep to be as much smart as possible and react fast. We have been the first to ship with the 3D Desktop technology early last year, we have been the first to ship with Beryl, the first Reiser4 Graphical LiveCD back in 2005, the first to adopt Project Utopia application stack (HAL, DBUS), and now, we have been the first to ship with Ext4 file system support and integration (still in development). Just a small note, this does not mean that Sabayon Linux is unstable, at all. This means that we give the choice to the users, users are happy even without Beryl/Compiz and using the old dear Ext3 file system. We don't choose for them.
    So, as you might have understood from my words, users are the fundamental part of the Sabayon Linux Project. We don't have investors yet, but if we would just have one, Sabayon Linux could become the #1 in a matter of months. This is what we are trying to reach, with just users donations, in terms of money and time.

  2. No politically driven decisions: a lot of distribution are politically constrained. We don't, and we'll never be like them. We are simply on the users' side. Do you want mono? We have it. Do you want Java? We have it. Do you want proprietary drivers? We have found the way to implement them, something that I call, runtime linking.

LXer: I understand Sabayon Linux succeeded RR4 Linux. Can you tell a bit about Sabayon Linux' history? When, how and why did you join RR4? As a Gentoo user I was really delighted to see a 'Ubuntu-like' distro based on Gentoo, but to other people the choice of Gentoo may seem odd. Why was Gentoo chosen as the distro to base RR4 on, wouldn't it be more logical to have chosen Debian or RedHat? How did RR4 become Sabayon Linux, and why the name of a dessert? Why did Sabayon Linux chose the goals it has at this moment of being a 'Linux desktop with as much as possible applications and technologies' that just work?

Fabio Erculiani:
I simply believe in the impossible. Many people told me, it's impossible to succeed with a Gentoo based distribution. And I showed them that they were wrong and I'll show how I'll be able to reach the 5th position on Distrowatch.com before the end of the year. I have a lot of bullets in my gun. I just need the funds and the most important thing, time. One bullet is called Entropy, and will hopefully see the light in few months. We are just busy with the website migration (preview here: http://www.sabayonlinux.org/smartme - thanks to the knowledge of Michele Tameni, a good dear friend of mine) [ The migration is done at the time of publishing this interview - ed ] and the 3.4 development branch (thanks to another friend of mine, Luca Palermo). But I work hard, even 16 hours a day. We'll get there.
RR4 Linux was born in late 2004, on the Gentoo Forums, as a project to improve the ugly Gentoo Linux LiveCD (it's still horrible nowadays... Gentoo Linux Installer is a bad copy of Anaconda, whose code and structure is sometimes very similar).
It's not a problem of choosing the right distro as a base, it's a problem of giving the power to the users, in the long term, I will work hard to transform Sabayon Linux in the best source and binary based distribution. This will have a good impact on the number of applications shipped on the DVD, we will be able to provide a better experience, no matter what users' skills are.

LXer: I understand Sabayon Linux has very few developers, and most of them have full time employment. Though Sabayon Linux stands on the shoulders of giants - Gentoo and Beryl, how many core-developers does Sabayon Linux have? How did such a small team manage to make Sabayon Linux, to make a whole website look so good and soon a portal too? How did Sabayon Linux manage to include the most brand new packages which even Gentoo deemed unstable, without making Sabayon Linux instable? Does Sabayon Linux work together with Gentoo in any way, like feedback from Sabayon to Gentoo?

Fabio Erculiani:
Yes, Sabayon Linux has few good developers yet, but have in mind a nice thing, I can't talk about that at the moment.
I just try to live with the donations, pay the bills, eat, and so on, but it's not that easy.
We have three core-developers and a set of internal beta testers. We can do all, that's not a problem. We are all driven by the passion. Gentoo has its stabilization plan. If a package is marked unstable on Gentoo, it does not mean that will make your computer crashy. It just means that the package has been updated recently or it's not included in their latest stable LiveCD or they are too lazy to mark it as stable after the stabilization period (or, the standardization period is not yet over). Most Gentoo developers don't shine, and it's a pity (and people are already aware of it).
Most Gentoo developers don't like/share our vision, but its founder, Daniel R. [Robins ed. ], is happy about Sabayon's success. There are real issues inside the Gentoo Foundation, but I hope that they'll solve their problem as soon as possible, I love Gentoo. From what I saw, they seem to be too much arrogant, especially relengs (release engineers).

LXer: I understand you had a hard time after you lost your father, and you became unemployed. How did you endure this difficulties, and was Sabayon Linux a help or an extra problem in the past few months? Also, I read Sabayon Linux can't go on if 'the bills aren't paid'. At the current rate of donations to Sabayon Linux, are the future of the Sabayon Linux as well as future bills safe at this time?

Fabio Erculiani:
Yes, true, I had a hard time, but if I'm here, it's also thanks to (my girlfriend and to) the Sabayon Linux Project and its ever-growing community. I think that I have the right vision, I just need the time to show the world my potential. "Lose" is not in my dictionary.
To grow, we need the help of the community, that's the issue. But I'm determined to succeed. Even Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google without much money. So, what's the problem then? If you have the potential, someday you'll have the success that you deserve.
At the current rate, they're not yet safe enough to say "hey, I'm so happy". Because of my father's death, I had to pay a lawyer, and we all know how much they cost. So, after the sadness for the lost, there have been the sadness for my wallet.
But I'm a positive guy, I'm 21 and I think that I'll be satisfied enough by all my efforts someday. As I told you, it's just a matter of time. And in the meantime, Sabayon will always be at the top of my priority list.

Photograph of Fabio Erculiani and his girlfriend
Fabio and his girlfriend

LXer: One of the greatest technologies, my friend and I agreed, is Beryl. My friend - being in the process of trying to become less dependent on Windows - was so excited about Beryl, he made his first native Linux install on his laptop, also to show it to his teacher. I read Beryl is 'interlinked' with Sabayon Linux. What is the status of the co-operation?

Fabio Erculiani:
Well, actually Beryl is merging into Compiz with the CompComm project. We are planning to move to Compiz before 3.4 final release.
I think that our partnership will be restored once CompComm will become stable enough.

LXer: Can you tell us what the next version of Sabayon Linux - 3.4 will bring? What are the main future plans for Sabayon Linux?

Fabio Erculiani:
Well, easy question: First of all, there will be Compiz and maybe CompComm extension. Then there will be Ext4 support and integration. A lot of bug fixes and the preparation of Entropy, that will hit Sabayon before the end of the year, I think. We have strengthened the Virtualization support, by launching our Windows Autorun application that let you boot Sabayon Linux inside Windows thanks to VMware Player. Anyway, for the full list of changes, please have a look at the Sabayon Linux 3.4 Loop1 and Loop2 release notes.

LXer bonus question: Is Sabayon Linux more popular in Italy than elsewhere? What about the state/popularity of Linux in Italy? How does it compare to - for example Linux popularity in Germany?

Fabio Erculiani:
Definitely. Sabayon Linux is very popular in Italy, also thanks to our local magazines. I'm Italian even if I don't share the Italian egoistic mentality. Average Italians are so. The most popular areas are Northern Europe, Oceania and the US. We have planned to strengthen our market share in the East Europe by the way.

LXer: Anything you might like to add?

Fabio Erculiani:
Sure. Please, help the project to grow! Don't forget to make a donation! Do you want Linux to succeed, then help us!

On behalf of the LXer team, thanks for your time and your efforts. Many thanks to the whole Sabayon Linux team for making such a great distro, which in my opinion is the best I ever used / saw when it comes to richness of user experience.

Get Sabayon Linux here!

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Comments (16)

Will Sabayon become maintained in the same way as Ubuntu?

Maistre ·
3.3 is impressively stable, but it's difficult to see how updating packages between each Sabayon release won't lead to breakages unless

(i) as the Wiki suggests, it's re-synched against Gentoo Stable, or

(ii) Sabayon provides an Ubuntu-style system of Sabayon-only security & bug-fix backports.

Or is that Entropy's intended purpose?
azerthoth ·
Sabayon syncs directly against the Gentoo repos IIRC. I seem to remember seeing that when I was playing with it a few weeks ago.
hkwint ·
Sabayon synchronization works in two steps:

1) The portage tree (recipes how to compile packages) is synced against the official Gentoo tree; 2) A portage overlay tree is synced against trees Sabayon added

Differences in which packages from the Gentoo official tree Gentoo uses and which Sabayon uses, are configured in the files in /etc/portage. The main problems when updating are, Sabayon Linux added some bleeding-edge package-versions to the list of 'package versions Sabayon deems stable enough', and this might conflict with some older packages expecting older versions of some basic dependencies.

I have had the same issue on my Gentoo box, now I run kde-base-3.5.6 (note: I do not run full KDE, only some parts of KDE I chose!): 3.5.5 is deemed stable by Gentoo, 3.5.6 is in the 'testing-branche'. I told Gentoo it's OK for me to use ~kde-base/kdebase-3.5.6 ~kde-base/kdelibs-3.5.6 ~kde-misc/krusader-3.5.6 and so on.

However, now I wanted to emerge kde-base/kde-i18n a problem occured: kde-base/kde-i18n-3.5.5 wanted kde-base-3.5.5, while krusader etc. wanted kde-base-3.5.6. Portage chose kde-i18n-3.5.5 because I didn't add kde-i18n-3.5.6 to the list I deemed stable yet, like I did with konqueror etc.

There are two ways to solve this issue: -Downgrade all kde-packages to 3.5.5; -Add ~kde-base/kde-i18n-3.5.6 to the list of packages you deem stable.

I chose the second solution because I wanted to run 3.5.6. To get rid of the issue 'forever', I did

#for i in $(ls /usr/portage/kde-base/); do echo "~kde-base/"${i}"-3.5.6" >> /etc/portage/packages.keywords; done

This took all package-names listed in the kde-base subdirectory of portage, pasted ~kde-base/ in front of it, and pasted -3.5.6 behind it, and added to the list of packages I deemed stable. Effectively, this means I deem all kde-base/*-3.5.6 packages stable and portage stops complaining about differing version-dependencies.

This KDE example goes for other software-branches too; and Sabayon Linux being very progressive is one of the problems of the possibility of failing updates. When updates fails, it normally is an issue of a package missing (like with the kernel-sources in the mini-install) or dependencies conflicts of 'unmasked/unkeyworded' bleeding edge and older packages.

With a little knowledge these problems are (most of the time) easy to solve, but I agree this is not the case for people who are rather new to Linux. Therefore, the latter should not use portage (Kuroo, on Sabayon) to update packages themselves, but should follow Sabayon update guides between releases, in my opinion.
Read the whole comment
Maistre ·
Restricting updates *only* to applications when they're subject to a GLSA, would I then be reasonably free of the danger of breakages?
hkwint ·
Probably, yes.
chickpea ·
Great article. I must admit that I am biased as I am an avid Sabayon-Linux (SL) user. In your post above however, you mention that kuroo is the package manager for SL, not portage (at least that seems to be what you are saying). Kuroo is just a front-end to portage, and many SL users consider it a bad one. So rent assured that SL uses portage like all gentoo-based distros. Also of note, a brand new GUI package manager for portage has emerged (pun intended) in the past few months called Portato. It is light years ahead of kuroo and is available through the sunrise and portato overlays to gentoo. Anyone that likes a gui package manager is admonished in SL to use portato now instead of kuroo (to save headaches for forum hounds like me). Check it out, it certainly adds usability to SL over kuroo. Note: I am not a long-time linux user (6 months and counting). SL was the second distro I tried (Ubuntu was the first for < one week). As a COMPLETE n00b I can attest that SL (3.2 at the time I started) was easy for me to figure out and use even on outdated equipment. It was an out of the box experience for me. While not the largest community on the web, SL forum is excellent. Of course we also have the benefit of the very best documented distro on the web: gentoo.
hkwint ·
I'm very pleased to hear Sabayon Linux also works for a 'n00b', it confirms what I already thought myself. Not being that 'n00b' myself anymore, it's sometimes hard to imagine what the problems are.

Great to see an alternative to Kuroo, I heard it wasn't that good from a friend. I knew that Sabayon Linux just uses portage, since I ordered my friend to use the command line to install some Logitech software for his keyboard with display, not aware there was a graphical frontend for portage. It worked fine, the small display of the keyboard was recognized, and there also seemed to be a tool to make all those zillion Logitech-keys to work.

Let's hope portato will be better.

Yes, but......

vainrveenr ·
Among other pluses and minuses compared to Sabayon, Ubuntu has 1) a phenomenal online-support community, very arguably one of the best 2) major sponsorship and promotion by Mark Shuttleworth's Canonical 3) a host of developers.... certainly more than 3-4

1) and 2)-related: although I do not particularly favor Ubuntu over other distros, someone recently going to Ubuntu's ShipIt feature for free mailed CDs (https://shipit.ubuntu.com/) happened to be very impressed to have Ubuntu up and working so quickly hassle-free from a shipped CD.

Even so, Sabayon certainly seems to have found its bleeding-edge niche.
dcparris ·
#1 is the most important for non-techies. The others tend to rely on a given user's perspective.
Sander_Marechal ·
I'd argue that #2 is important too. Not the money itself, but the free shipit CDs it pays for. I bet shipit is a major contributor to Ubuntu's early uptake and succes.
hkwint ·
Sabayon Linux does have a one click shortcut which directly brings it users into the Sabayon IRC help channel (without any configuration needed, only one click!).

Sabayon developers are in that IRC channel to help people too, I understood. They also answer questions which lots of other devels would deem 'stupid'. I also saw questions being answered within 5 minutes in the forum.

From personal experiences, I can say Gentoo support and docs is equal to or even better than Ubuntu support and docs. Mots of the time, problems with Sabayon also occur in Gentoo. I must admit I am not used to Ubuntu documentation, but I found it rather hard to find the right documentation when experimenting with Ubuntu. Gentoo documentation seemed better organized in my opinion, but that's probably because I have been using Gentoo docs for more than three years now.

Though Sabayon doesn't have a host of developers, it is more up to date than Ubuntu (out of the box) and I understood it offers better Wifi support (also out of the box) than Ubuntu, and my graphical card worked with the SabayonLiveDVD but not with the UbuntuLiveDVD (X froze in Ubuntu), so it seems if you want an up to date distribution, the number of hosts don't have to have much impact really. Also, I understood there were some issues with the stable version of Ubuntu, so in my opinion, Ubuntu is not that good. I didn't try it [Ubuntu] that much, because I work on my light-weight Gentoo (WindowMaker; kind of fluxbox/XFCE but less bloated for those who don't know) box. Anyway, Beryl working on a LiveDVD without any problems, without any configuring (only chosing AIGLX or XGL IIRC) impressed me a lot, and so were the many applications on the LiveDVD. I can't remember having this whole Wow! experience when using Ubuntu. Ubuntu seemed rather the same than Suse to me, except Ubuntu didn't screw up the update process. Haven't tried Sabayon update yet, it seems possible for problems to come up when updating, but they're working on that right now.

Like you have read in the interview, they're working on #2.

Looking at the current pace of Sabayon-development, I'd say it's a much faster process, even if there are far less developers - than Ubuntu development, but that's only my opinion (I only followed Sabayon Linux development between 3.26 and 3.4 loop 2, which is a short time, and I saw the website and theme change). Probably it helps the three main developers are friends, and use the same language.

Looking at the growth of Sabayon Linux at distrowatch (I saw it going up from #9to #5 or so - based on last 30 days statistics, though this is only indicational), I'd say Sabayon Linux isn't a niche, it's for everybody like Ubuntu is. Sabayon's (Beryls?) start menu is far more easy to use than the Ubuntu one, the latter basically being the cumbersome Windows startup menu. Those are a crime to use (and it surprises me this ancient start menu is still in Ubuntu 7.04) for people not used to working with the mouse, like my grandma: If you slip of the start-menu, the whole menu is gone. In my opinion, the Beryl-cube also ads more oversight. Most Windows users don't get the idea of multiple workspaces like we're used to in Linux. However, when they see the cube, they immediately get it; since they can see which applications are where (strange, seems it's not only eye-candy after all). Also, I found the function to 'slide' a window in Sabayon very useful, to read a webpage and type what I read in the page I was working on. Sabayon also offers some free game-(previews), and IIRC also a music-tailored configuration.

Probably, you should give it a spin too, using the LiveDVD (if you didn't do so yet). Note: I'm used to Gentoo, which means for me it's easier to work with Sabayon than with Ubuntu.
Read the whole comment
chickpea ·
Just because Ubuntu has more developers does not make them better developers. No knocking Ubuntu, what they have done for the linux community has been phenominal, but SL adds a lot more configurability, stylishness, and cutting-edge cool than Ubuntu has. SL forums are very helpful (even more so than Ubuntu as the knowledge base of SL users is generally more advanced than those on Ubuntu forums). Just one man's voice in the wilderness, but I much prefer SL to Ubuntu (I have tried them both and stuck with SL).
Teron ·
This seems to be nice:

"This distribution contains proprietary and non-GPL softwares too (like from NVIDIA, ATI, Google, etc). Before running them, be sure to read their license and agree with that, otherwise, just remove those applications. To run SabayonLinux without Proprietary drivers, just use "noproprietary" boot flag."
dcparris ·
Seems like they would set it up to use a "proprietary" boot flag, and have it install proprietary as an option - not as a default. Yeah, I know. I'm opening a can of worms. I should stick to Debian or GNewsense. I probably will. :-)
Sander_Marechal ·
Don, I have a better idea. Why can the installer or Live CD bootloader not detect that there is hardware present that requires a proprietry driver and ask what to do? Only when the install/boot was done with a "quiet" setting it should default to something.

I've always found it strange that an installer can detect all hardware and determine what needs to be configured, but cannot ask the user if he'd like driver A or B for his video card.
dcparris ·
Your idea makes sense to me. Not being a "real" hacker, I wouldn't have a clue as to the why's and wherefore's

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