Installer, Controll Centre for Sabayon.

[Elmar]

I have been using Suse and OpenSuse since 1996 and trialing Sabayon. The result wants me to switch to a "Rolling Upgrade" distribution like Gentoo or Sabayon. The complexity of installing, configuring and maintaining Gentoo and Sabayon without YAST holds me back from converting the 16 PC's and Laptops in my extended family to Sabayon/Gentoo.

A few of the many installer problems:
- Can't configure the installer to a fixed IP address, name server address, etc.
- There is no way to configure the installer to use the fastest mirror. Downloading from the default mirror is Italy is at about 50Kbytes per second whereas the most suitable mirror delivers 1.0Mbytes per second.
- Setting of default system language. It's impossible to set the default system language during install to en_AU or en_ZA, etc. Only en_US and en_GB.
- Setting additional user languages to anything than the main 4 - 5 European languages and one Chinese dialect is impossible.
- Selecting, avoiding application patterns and individual applications to be installed and/or blocked from being installed/updated is impossible.

A few of the many missing GUI's for configuring Sabayon:
- No GUI to configure a SAMBA Server & Client
- No GUI to configure and select a NTP server.
- No GUI to configure a mail server
- No GUI to configure a Firewall
- No GUI to configure Printing
- No GUI to configure Scanning
etc. etc. etc.

Please consider adapting and using YAST (GPL2) to install, configure and maintain Sabayon. Also consider to add a facility to chose Sabayon or Gentoo and/or to convert between Sabayon and Gentoo with optional (sane) compiler flag tick boxes.

See:
http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:YaST_Modules

Do a "NETWORK" install to test the YAST Installer and have a good look at and test the facilities provided during and after installation. Also have a look at and test the text based YAST installer and configuration system.

Hans

[Thev00d00]

I think you have an overreliance on GUI tools by the looks of it

However, we (Sabayon/Gentoo) are always looking for new people, so why not knock something together and put it on github?

[geeksoldier]

Elmar:

- There is no way to configure the installer to use the fastest mirror. Downloading from the default mirror is Italy is at about 50Kbytes per second whereas the most suitable mirror delivers 1.0Mbytes per second.

Regarding this, in console, type

Code: Select all

equo mirrorsort sabayon-weekly

which will test all of the mirrors and automatically select the fastest one.

- No GUI to configure Printing
- No GUI to configure Scanning

If you have an HP printer, you can install hplip http://wiki.sabayon.org/index.php?title=HOWTO:_Install_a_HP_Printer. There is other great information in the wiki http://wiki.sabayon.org/index.php?title=HOWTOs that can help with your other issues.

[Elmar]

I think you have an overreliance on GUI tools by the looks of it

However, we (Sabayon/Gentoo) are always looking for new people, so why not knock something together and put it on github?

It's nice for Newbie to have GUI for items you may only use once a year instead of a cmd line where with one wrong flag you screw up your whole system.

My knowledge and experience is limited to writing simple command line utilities in "C".

[Elmar]

Elmar:

- There is no way to configure the installer to use the fastest mirror. Downloading from the default mirror is Italy is at about 50Kbytes per second whereas the most suitable mirror delivers 1.0Mbytes per second.

Regarding this, in console, type

Code: Select all

equo mirrorsort sabayon-weekly

which will test all of the mirrors and automatically select the fastest one.

- No GUI to configure Printing
- No GUI to configure Scanning

If you have an HP printer, you can install hplip http://wiki.sabayon.org/index.php?title=HOWTO:_Install_a_HP_Printer. There is other great information in the wiki http://wiki.sabayon.org/index.php?title=HOWTOs that can help with your other issues.

I know the CMDL utilities are there and I have used them. They should be automatically utilized during the installation process. See www.mirrorbrain.org

Just remember, these Gui's are nice to have to attract new users who are not familiar with Gentoo, etc.

[nachoig]

Elmar:

Regarding this, in console, type

Code: Select all

equo mirrorsort sabayon-weekly

which will test all of the mirrors and automatically select the fastest one.

LOL! Rigo is capable to do the same. Anyway, the command is incorrect. You forgot the "repo" term.

Code: Select all

equo repo mirrorsort sabayon-weekly

If you have an HP printer, you can install hplip http://wiki.sabayon.org/index.php?title=HOWTO:_Install_a_HP_Printer. There is other great information in the wiki http://wiki.sabayon.org/index.php?title=HOWTOs that can help with your other issues.

I prefer the Gentoo's wiki instead of Sabayon's wiki.

It's nice for Newbie to have GUI for items you may only use once a year instead of a cmd line where with one wrong flag you screw up your whole system.

My knowledge and experience is limited to writing simple command line utilities in "C".

Erm.... Yeah, the problem here is: Sabayon is not a distro for newbies in GNU Linux (at least in my opinion). DistroWatch is wrong about this. The lack of these features plus the use of Gentoo way to do the things complicates the newbie's life. It's better for intermediate users. In my case, I like to say: I use Sabayon thanks to Arch (and maybe Debian). openSUSE is better for your situation and I don't understand why you switched to Sabayon.

[Elmar]

I try to switch from OpenSuse to Sabayon/Gentoo because:

1.) I look after and more than 10 PCs and Laptops in my extended family. They all need to be upgraded every 12 month or so. Usually a fresh install and configuration and sorting out wireless problems. This is a terrible pain in the neck that makes me look for a stable distribution with "Rolling Upgrades". The last upgrade from OpenSuse 11.4 with Gnome 2 to 12.2 with Gnome 3, including configuration took on average 6 hours per system.

2.) I need one system fully optimized for the hardware to run a custom application in addition to the usual LibreOffice, Firefox, etc. This will either be Gentoo or Sabayon re-compliled.

[svantoviit]

Ever heard of Tumbleweed?

Another option would be LMDE, maybe it's more friendly for you.

[cmost]

I have to agree with Thev00d00 in that you're relying on GUI tools for things that are relatively easy to configure without them. I've been using Linux for ten years and Sabayon for three years now and find that I can do everything with the tools provided. My advice if you like YaST so much is to stick with OpenSUSE.