Sabayon comes in 3 flavors: X86, X86_64, and Mini. The first two are DVD images, the last is one CD. I chose the last option since I have limited bandwidth. From what I gather of their website, Sabayon is based on Gentoo but offers a compiling-free install. This piqued my interest.

Install:

The disc gives you a choice at boot to go to the LiveCD or your choice of text/GUI installs. I chose the GUI install. This apparently loads a modified LiveCD environment.

There's a lot of down time between loading the LiveCD, choosing whether or not you want XGL+compiz and actually getting to the desktop.

This wouldn't necessarily be so bad if the maintainers would throw in a progress screen or something instead of just letting the user wonder whether or not the OS has frozen up.

The LiveCD loaded Nvidia drivers for my card automatically, which is certainly a nice touch. I was then brought to what looked like a Fluxbox environment and presented with the Sabayon version of Redhat's Anaconda installer.

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