Sabayon 7 Brings Linux Heaven

by Ostatic Staff - Oct. 13, 2011

Sabayon 7 was recently released bringing lots of updates and improvements. The announcement said, "If you really enjoyed Sabayon 6, this will be even more fun and cute. There you have it, shining at full bright, for your home computer, your laptop and your home servers." This Gentoo-based everything-but-the-kitchen-sink distro is maturing like the proverbial bottle of wine. It's getting smooooth.

Highlights this release include:

● Optimized Linux Kernel 3.0

● Native btrfs support

● GNOME 3.2.0

● KDE 4.7.1

● Customized Xfce 4.8

● LibreOffice 3.4.3

● Semi-automated package updates

● An optional Fusion Kernel



The new Fusion Kernel is explained by Michael Larabel as, "a new effort led by the few Sabayon developers and it's aim is to be similar to the Zen Linux kernel sources. The Fusion kernel is supposed to be a "Sabayon-flavoured Linux kernel sources on steroids." Among its features are integration of the Brain Fuck Scheduler (BFS), the BFQ I/O scheduler, Reiser4 file-system support, experimental Btrfs patches, experimental DRM patches, and new wireless-next drivers."

For me this release is a bit bittersweet. In Sabayon's early days I looked forward to the new releases because my current system at the time would most likely be acting up and needing a reinstall. Then later on it became more stable and I began applying updates and enjoying the rolling update aspect - so, as fresh installs grew less necessary new releases became less important.

But for those needing a new or fresh install, Sabayon 7 comes in live DVD versions for KDE and GNOME as well as 32-bit and 64-bit. Developers said they've spruced Xfce up this release so I was anxious to see that. They were having a bit of a difficulty with GNOME 3.x there for a while, but I guess they worked it out. Fabio Erculiani said, "During this cycle, the development team spent a lot of time on integrating GNOME 3.2 the way users might actually start to love it."

Isn't that the same wallpaper from Sabayon 6?

Linuxbsdos.com has screenshots of the GNOME 3.2 and KDE Plasma desktops.