Suggestions & first-time experience by a Gentoo/Ubuntu u

[bmartin]

I decided to give Sabayon a whirl yesterday. It's the first distributions that has detected my awful Broadcom chipset in my laptop (Compaq V5101US) and been able to set it up properly. The install was very, very long but relatively painless on my year-old computer. I decided to use the Gnome desktop; I normally use Fluxbox in Gentoo, but emerging Gnome late in the game is rather painful.

Gnome looked awful; it looked like a very bad KDE. I'm used to the Gnome you see in Fedora or Ubuntu; the default Gnome desktop is ghastly! Whoever decided to make it look like that must favor KDE! I modified /etc/skel to rectify the aesthetic and functional discrepancies I encountered, then copied my make.conf over from my PC; it has the same basic specs and so forth, including the same kind of processor. I was able to emerge a couple things successfully. I have a day job, so I decided to emerge all of the stuff on my computer to use my CFLAGS and USE variables... and this is where the nightmare began.

I had an awful lot of packages (several dozen) blocking ebuilds. Most of them were in kde-base, so I wrote a script to remove all of them, leaving a few things to remove by hand. Some binary packages that were blocking ebuilds didn't exist on my computer , so I removed the packages that were blocked by them. Some ebuilds also failed to remove and I had to remove them by hand , and on top of all that, I've had problems remerging some of the binary packages. However, I'm happy to report that my wireless works perfectly, although the worthless Windows hardware switch that controls it doesn't (I couldn't care less, but I always look for the "amazement" factor in Linux).

Do people really prefer the altered Gnome? It scared me! I struggled to find a terminal, let alone the programs I wanted to use. Also, why is it so difficult to recompile the packages that come as preinstalled binaries in Sabayon? Why were 130-something KDE packages preinstalled? Is an "expert mode" in the works so that people who want to select which packages are installed can do so?

I used the ncurses-style installer on the 3.3 Live DVD because the graphical install failed, as did the Live CD. The screen goes blank for an indefinite period of time.

Despite all of these criticisms, I'm very happy with Sabayon so far. I'm used to fighting with software to make it work exactly the way I want, so I've been able to take care of most of this myself, although I'm sure less Gentoo-savvy people might have problems. It was nice to speed up the installation process with a graphical installer, as I've always had to do everything at a console due to Gentoo's buggy graphical installation. After my experience with Portage, I can't go back to Ubuntu.

[wolfden]

Gnome is customizable - can't please everyone, apply your own theme

Package Selection upon install is something in the works yet, try the mini-cd?

Welcome to the world of compiling

[bmartin]

I guess this is my fault. This may sound ridiculous, but I don't have CD-Rs anymore, just DVD media, so I decided to burn the DVD version, not knowing that I'd get a lot of stuff I didn't want.

The Gnome default doesn't seem palatable. Too much of the common/useful functionality is hidden. I guess I'm just really surprised that the theme chosen was so much different from what I expected.

Only 266 packages left to emerge... on the other hand, I'm getting some weird errors while merging some builds and I'm not really sure why. I've been keeping a list of the packages that don't build properly. If I want them, I can always merge them later, I suppose. Strangely, I've never had an ebuild fail on Gentoo. I'm not using and -f compilation flags, so I don't know why it's happening.

[voxiac]

I had an awful lot of packages (several dozen) blocking ebuilds.

Like in this thread?:
http://www.sabayonlinux.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7038
Or something completely different?

Strangely, I've never had an ebuild fail on Gentoo.

Were you using the stable branch then?

[bmartin]

I had an awful lot of packages (several dozen) blocking ebuilds.

Like in this thread?:
http://www.sabayonlinux.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7038
Or something completely different?

Exactly like that thread, except that my make.conf was copied over from another Sempron 3300, so the CFLAGS and CHOST (586) should be the same. I had to change a few USE flags and my video card.

Strangely, I've never had an ebuild fail on Gentoo.

Were you using the stable branch then?

I used the official 3.3 release. Is that stable?

After cleaning out the KDE packages, blocking the kdebase library and removing everything that depends on it, and further emerging things, for some reason, hald no longer works (because dbus is missing or something like that) and I can no longer boot my system properly.

Something feels very wrong. I thought that I'd be able to use Sabayon to get up and running with Gentoo more quickly, and I'm finding that it's not the case. I'm going to try to fix dbus and hald and so forth... the only reason I can think of that the compilations might be failing if this is stable and the builds are fine is my CHOST variable, but I believe that 586 is correct.

[voxiac]

Strangely, I've never had an ebuild fail on Gentoo.

Were you using the stable branch then?

I used the official 3.3 release. Is that stable?

After cleaning out the KDE packages, blocking the kdebase library and removing everything that depends on it, and further emerging things, for some reason, hald no longer works (because dbus is missing or something like that) and I can no longer boot my system properly.

Something feels very wrong. I thought that I'd be able to use Sabayon to get up and running with Gentoo more quickly, and I'm finding that it's not the case. I'm going to try to fix dbus and hald and so forth... the only reason I can think of that the compilations might be failing if this is stable and the builds are fine is my CHOST variable, but I believe that 586 is correct.

I just thought you might have used the stable branch when you were running Gentoo, but since Sabayon uses the unstable one by default, it's obvious that there will be problems during '-uND world'. Especially if your make.conf, which you've copied from your old install, forces Sabayon to go over to stable branch again... (or is my assumption wrong and you used unstable branch when you were on Gentoo?) I've gone through something like that myself, i.e. tried to stabilize Sabayon by deleting 'ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=~amd64' from the default make.conf and emerge -uND world. That was fun...
If you're interested, there's a more mild way of stabilizing Sabayon:
http://www.servwise.com.au/blog-paul/?p=46

[bmartin]

Your assumption is correct. I always use stable everything, so long as I can help it, and when I need an unstable package, I simply unmask it (e.g. I always grab the newest version of Wine I can get, as the D3D fixes are worth it).

The lack of package selection was a little disappointing; I'd rather install a minimal set of programs and then have the option to install more later, kind of like Ubuntu does. Gentoo simply has too many little steps to make it quick to set up, especially after you add something like emerge, and Sabayon got my Broadcom chipset up and running with no problems; it was the first distro to do that, though I might try the Fiesty Live CD on it today. I really don't want to switch to Ubuntu now that I've used Gentoo, but I can't bring myself to go through all the tedious steps of setting up Gentoo by hand, especially when the wireless is such a pain on other distros.

I was expecting Sabayon to be a bit more minimalist. It might be a bit more friendly if the CD could be reinserted after installation (like the way Ubuntu's can) and additional packages can then be installed. Installing everything in one step seems like overkill. The distro seems a little too distant from what I've experienced with Gentoo.

I guess my expectation was that I could use my stable Gentoo settings and that my world update would go off without a hitch. I intend to salvage this installation if I can (by fixing the problems I've having with hald and KDM); otherwise, I'll probably wait until Sabayon matures a little more.

Thanks for the stabilizer link. I will definitely give that a go. An unstable installation is not for me. I've always been amazed with Linux in that I've had very few programs crash in my 3-4 years of Linux usage.

[chickpea]

Heh, we may be immature, but you are experiencing the advanced users problems with the DVD too many damn packages. The mini (CD) is much better in this respect. But as you mentioned, it is not possible for you, so you are stuck with a Hobbes choice. Sorry. Not really an issue with the distro, it's an issue with you.