Sabayon ? [Solved]

[Woodsman]

Hello; I am a newcomer to linux, have been using ubuntu 12.04 for 4 months now. I heard about sabayon in the ubuntu
forum, sounded good so I wanted to check it out. I have a lot of questions, but I will restrict myself to only a couple.

First Is it possible to purchase the install disk outright, rather than the download ? I ask because thats what i did with
ubuntu, and avoided a lot of the install problems i read about in the forum, also i have no experience with the download
which i assume has to be burnt onto a cd.
Or is it better to download directly to a usb drive ? Again i have no experience with this. I am still unsure which
DE to go with as my only experience is with unity. I am curious about mate.
All advice gratefully appreciated, Thank you.

[micia]

Hi Woodsman, welcome to the Sabayon Community.

I don't think it is possible to buy a DVD rather than downloading it.
What you download is an iso file, this kind of file can be burnt using any burning application available (k3b, brasero, xfburn, cdrecord, and so on...).

You can either burn the iso to a DVD (some minimal versions can also be burnt to a CD), or create a bootable USB stick with it.
The recommended way to create an USB stick is using dd, which is available on every Linux distribution.
To create an USB stick using dd you must:

1) Download a Sabayon edition, a user friendly listing of the available isos is available at:
http://best.sabayon.org/iso/main.html

In this example I assume you downloaded the iso to: /home/user/sabayon.iso.

2) Check the MD5 for extra caution, to check the MD5 sum from a Linux system do the following:

Code: Select all

md5sum /home/user/sabayon.iso


The output should match the MD5 number listed in the mirror.

3) Connect a large enough USB stick to your computer, in this example I assume the connected USB stick is /dev/sdb which might not be the case for you.
You don't need to mount the device, it is actually better keeping it unmounted.

4) Create the bootable USB stick, notice that this will wipe out all the existing data from your USB stick, make sure to replace the iso file path and the device path with your own paths.
(as root)

Code: Select all

dd if="/home/user/sabayon.iso" of="/dev/sdb"


This command might take a while to complete.

[Woodsman]

Thank you for the reply, i noticed the following on the home page.




There are many different Sabayon variants. Each one is designed for a specific purpose and designed to bring out the best in your hardware

We provide a Live versions of most of our variants, so you can try out Sabayon without it touching your Computer's Hard
Drive.

What does this mean??

[Stupot]

This means you can run Sabayon from the DVD without actually installing it on your hard drive, to make sure everything works nicely before you actually install it.

[Woodsman]

Thank you. I don't know a lot about burning cd's other than for photos, so do I have the peocedure right ie; I download
the sabayon of my choice, save it somewhwere, presumably downloads. Then I burn it to DVD as an image file. Is there
more to it ?? Again I am a novice at this procedure, and I would rather ask questions than rush ahead and make mistakes.

[micia]

The forum exists so that you can ask questions to the community.

No, that should be it. Once you burn it, like you correctly stated, from an image file (don't select data disc, this would create a DVD that contains the iso file, instead of burning the iso file contents to the DVD), you should have the live DVD.
Be sure to verify the checksum of the downloaded image (the md5sum step I've explained in my previous post), it is useful to ensure the downloaded image is good, most burning applications are able to perform such check.

[Woodsman]

Thank's again micia; I will have to go to the public library to do the download,so that may be a day or two.
I do have one more question though, does it matter if i use windows to do the download and burn the DVD
or should I use ubuntu? To be honest I have had dissappointing results downloading with 12.04. Although I have
just moments ago erased 12.04.1 and reinstalled 12.04 from the live CD as it hasn't worked as well since I did the
updates, so i thought i may as well start over.
It's working of course as thats what I'm using now. I will probably go with the KDE, DE as I have a live CD
ordered with kubuntu as well.
I am assuming that a partition editor is included with the live version, {gparted} ?

[Stupot]

Correct, partition manager is on the LiveDVD.

You should be fine to download it with either windows or Ubuntu.

[Woodsman]

Stupot, Thank you for the reply, and the confirmation.

[Woodsman]

An update here,I downloaded sabayon with mate, unfortunatley don't have a CD at the moment to burn.
Tried several times to download the KDE version , no success, I may have to wait until I can get to a wired
network connection.