Manual partitioning scheme support for Sabayon 7

[twilight]

Hi,

Today I downloaded the spinbase livecd and immediatelly fired up the installation mode. I booted from Virtualbox and had my physical disk on access to the spare partition I have, in order to be installed there and booted physically upon success.

After configuring all the necessary stuff, I ended up to the partition "wizard". To my surprise there was no option to manually set the partitions and the mount points, like I do with other distributions.

I have a gpt partition scheme with:

/dev/sda1 (Arch Linux legacy bios boot flag, using syslinux)
/dev/sda2 (target partition for Sabayon with the intention of chainloading it from syslinux)
/dev/sda3 (files mounted as /media/Storage)
/dev/sda4 (2.1 GiB swap partition)

So why I couldn't set them manually like I do with Ubuntu for example? Is this because Sabayon doesn't support GPT, or is it a design defect?

I think there is a way of doing it by installing in a virtual disk, transferring the data somehow in the physical disk (I haven't done such thing yet) and then fix it up through chroot, but that's a lengthy process.

So is there a way to do it the "normal" way?

[DarthLukan]

You were using SpinBase, it doesn't have the GUI installer that has all of the added features, rather, it has only the text installer that has limited features. Try one of the other images with a GUI and boot into the graphical installation, from there, you will see that there are many more install options.

[twilight]

Thanks for the advice DarthLukan I 'll give the full ISOs a try.

I started with the spinbase, because I like to make a custom setup rather that wasting the bandwidth downloading the whole image and then update all these unnecessary (for me) packages.

I consider it as a very importand issue not having this feature in the spinbase installation framework, because users like me cannot install it otherwise. Its a show stopper.

[DarthLukan]

SpinBase is not a complete ISO, it's more of what you use with Molecule to build your perfect spin. That said, if you want a small CD sized ISO that is a good base to build on, you can use CoreCDX (make sure to remove 'gentoo=nox nox' from the boot line so that it doesn't boot into console mode) or you can use Awesome, LXDE, and E17. LXDE would be the easiest for you to use (because it has a more familiar interface) and all of those fit on a CD (<700MB).

If you have the time, you can use your SpinBase ISO along with Molecule to build your own spin of Sabayon, it's not officially supported, but if nothing else is going on those of us who use it won't mind shooting you some info. There is even a How To written by Joost_Op on the forums if you use the search bar.

Hopefully that gets you started

[twilight]

In that case CoreCDX would probably be the best choice for me, but its still huge for my tastes.

I used Arch for a long time, downloading the netinstall image (180 MB) and doing network install. I would prefer there was a similar way with Sabayon, but since there is not, its ok.

I like to try the latest GNOME, as I am too afraid of doing it from Arch.

[DarthLukan]

If you are that concerned with Bandwidth, a rolling release distro may not be for you...

[twilight]

If you are that concerned with Bandwidth, a rolling release distro may not be for you...

I am not concerned about bandwidth. I just consider a waste of time doing all the steps I mentioned on my posts above.

[DarthLukan]

Then a full ISO is the way to go. You have to remember, other than the CoreCDX and base spins used to create custom spins, Sabayon is meant to be an out of the box experience, meaning, every just works. What you want is a small initial ISO and then to download your whole system custom. You can do that with the CD-sized ISOs or you can put the time into setting up Molecule and building off of spin base. Either way, you're gonna be using up time and resources.