The Days and Years of Sabayon
The year 2004, my first jump into the Gentoo world after a slew of other distros. Thanks to a good friend of mine for finally convinceing me to try it. I had heard the nightmares of installing gentoo, but I wanted to learn more. I hated the terminal, I liked my point and click GUI so it was a big change. I glanced over the handbook without really reading it and went upon my venture, I failed miserably. I just never learned enough from my past years of GUI using. A month goes by and I read the handbook a little better this time and off I went once again on my venture and failed once again. I wasn’t going to give up and this time printed the handbook and followed it step by step and it was a success. The next couple of years I learned more about linux than I had ever did in the years before.
In late 2005 I had got wind of a distro call RR4 designed by lxnay and it got me curious. I needed to reinstall my gentoo system anyway so I grabbed an iso download and gave it a whirl. I remember it booting up to a beautiful desktop with everything working nicely. I can’t recall if I installed it right than and there as there was at the time issues with nvidia and it’s drivers with my card. I believe I switched out my video card to a newer one first than installed. I started hanging around the website and irc room. It was a quiet time with people seldom posting and irc consisted of like 6 people. As lxnay was pushing releases I would test also and report my issues. More people started coming into irc and more people started posting on the forum. Things really started to get active when we switched names from RR/4 RR/64 to Sabayon Linux. We had our regulars and we were on our way to forming a close knit of volunteers willing to devote time and energy. We’ve been through our ups and downs trying to improve each and every day. We experienced and shared personal ups and downs also. We’ve had a lot of people come and go, but we always see new people coming.
In present day we are still improving and adapting to make a great experience for everyone. Our releases are getting better and better. Entropy is developing constantly and it’s got the attention of many. We are changing from a full dvd to a minimal dvd of the KDE Desktop and Gnome Desktop Environments. Work is just starting on the KDE minimal DVD release. There is no release date for this nor a roadmap, but it’s going to happen. Stay tuned to the blog here for updates. We are seriously in the hunt for some good developers that want to help. We are always looking for good testers that can be active. We struggle to find good devs and testers that can be active. We do have a Mailing List available for developers to contact us through, please use it if you are interested. You can also send an email to anyone on the contact list that can be found here. Of course we could always use help with translations, artwork, support, ebuilders, etc etc etc….
For the new users out there, I have to stress at this time, Sabayon Linux does have a learning curve and a good understanding of how gentoo works is vital, along with knowing your hardware. Sure it looks all fancy and works out of the box great, but things can and will go wrong, you will need to figure out what and how. The great thing is, plenty of documentation through the forums, wiki and irc is out there that will point you to the correct path. I know many users don’t like to be told to read. I use to be one of those users myself and I have to say, the more you learn/use the easier it will get. So please do yourself a favor and take the time to go over the website and various documentation. A good starting place with lots of links to bookmark is compiled for you already.
I’m going to say a quick thanks to the new testers that helped with the last release. If I had the ability to hand Joseph Howse a tester of the year trophy, I sure would. We need a dozen more just like him. This guy gave 110% and asked for more. Thank you Joseph and I hope you stick around for a long time.