One advantage of using Sabayon is that you can compile programs to be optimized for your CPU architecture. There are many optimization options and I use -march=native -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -ftracer -floop-interchange -floop-block -ftree-loop-distribution -freorder-blocks-and-partition. Chrome on Linux is the fastest browser for sites that you visit often, as they are cached. Furthermore, you can boost Chrome performance beyond the benchmarks.
I follow a few simple steps for upgrading Sabayon:

1. equo update
2. equo install entropy equo
3. equo repo mirrorsort sabayon-weekly
4. equo upgrade
5. equo conf update

Wolfden has a nice article explaining these steps. To upgrade Chrome, I use the Portage package manager:

1. emerge –sync
2. layman -S
3. equo install sys-devel/gcc-[version]
4. gcc-config -c
5. equo install www-client/chromium-[version]
6. emerge -av –oneshot –nodeps =www-client/chromium-[version]

There were errors coming from different packages when I tried to compile them without steps 3-5, such as configure: error: C compiler cannot create executables and gcc-config: error: could not run/locate ‘g++’. Installing the gcc version listed in gcc-config -c fixed the problem.

I just started using e again yesterday after installing Sabayon. With the most recent version, it has become the most productive desktop environment I’ve every used with features like:

• automatic cursor center on new windows
• focusing of windows under cursor, allowing typing and clicking without raising
• coupled with transparency on unfocused windows

I also updated my performance tweaks for Sabayon, so it’s the best browsing experience, too, with right click link mapped to open foreground tab. So I got to experience e17 as it was released today after about 7 years of development.

This was about one and half years ago on another machine that I no longer use, but the insight just came to me. Many things just lined up and fell into place instantly. I had Sabayon installed on my Inspiron 1520 quad-booting with XP, 7, and Elive. Running the system update before installing LLVM Clang for comping Python to JavaScript, the system got broken. I ran a system update to upgrade all packages because I had been using 7.  Unfortunately, the it broke the package manager!

This should never happen, and I wasn’t able to find any threads on Google. So I gave up on Sabayon and got a desktop to run Xubuntu in a VM. I thought the package manager was too dumb, stuck doing an upgrade of itself.

As all Linux users know, once the package manager is broken, the system is bonked. Installing, upgrading, or removing any software must go through the package manager. The upgrade finished half-way, I was left with a console without X or a graphical window manager. Fortunately, I had many other OS’s to use on the machine. They’re still there today, and today I just read the Sabayon wiki on mixing portage and entropy.

…when mixing Portage and Entropy, never use Portage to update Portage. Sabayon uses a version of Portage that is hard masked in Portage. This means that you will actually be DOWNGRADING, not upgrading portage …

So the summer before this one, I simply downgraded the package manager, which caused it to stop working.

Time to update Sabayon, after installing the wireless driver with a wired connection, about a week ago. Following the routine, entering several commands, letting them finish in a couple of hours. It’s been about 8 months since I last updated. Mostly because of the lack of a wired connection. I expected everything to go as expected, except it got stuck at

which means the package manager is broken. As the console suggested, “you’re in deep shit”. Normally, on any Linux system, if the package manager is done, the system cannot be repaired. If it happens in the middle of an upgrade, then those half upgraded libraries breaks the system. By circular cause and effect, a broken package manager is stuck in a loop.
However, Sabayon is redundant (hint). Entropy does the same thing as Portage. My plan at this point was to run

and continue with the upgrade…

I started using Sabayon back in 2007 as it was more fun than Windows XP. I decided on it after trying out many other Linux distributions with Live CDs downloaded and burned at school. Gentoo was the fastest Linux distribution, and Sabayon made it easy to install. At that time, it had automatic graphics card configuration to enable Compiz-Fusion. Compiz-Fusion is like the glassy windows you see in Vista, plus many other effects (the most famous being wobbly windws). I suppose that was the reason so many people tried Sabayon at the time. Unfortunately, on the laptop where I installed Sabayon, the graphics card was not capable of these effects (but I did get lightweight transparent windows, highly useful on a small screen). Anyways, here’s what the wallpaper looked like:

At that time, Sabayon (since it was just a way to install Gentoo) was for power users. The dark red and fossilized penguin footprint certainly leaves the rest of the pack behind. I was able to build a system on an Inspiron 1000 that would load the next web page as soon as I clicked on the link. The Reiser file system did the trick for caches, and compile time optimizations made better use of the Pentium 4 CPU.

Later in 2008, I got my own laptop and dual-booted XP with Sabayon 3.4. It’s hard to say which OS I liked better. Linux had trouble with wireless and crashed whenever I launched a program that used OpenGL. Windows came with all the right drivers, except I can’t do anything besides work and play there. I ended up playing a game called NetHack and spending a lot of wasted effort on an English presentation on Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. I think I simply used Windows more because I liked the desktop colors:

Sabayon had too many splashes of red here and there, but all that changed with the next release.

This was my first glimpse of the future of Sabayon. It (I mean he) was (all) about dreams (besides a surprise for me). I remember this quite well. It was when Sabayon became a binary distribution instead of just a Gentoo box that came with the box (not exactly out of the box as the wireless required ndiswrapper). Let me emphasize that point again. I got a system I couldn’t boot as soon as I tried hibernate.  Thus, the dreams burned to the ground. So I went back to Windows again, this time with Vista. When I had the chance, I made my computer quad boot with XP, Vista, Sabayon, and Kubuntu. All of them had special characteristics and capabilities. Vista was the only one that could suspend and wake with even cpu frequency scaling on both cores. Kubuntu was the only one that supported a full KDE 4 desktop. Now days, KDE 4 is available for all 4 of them. In the February of 2009, I tried Sabayon 4:

partly hoping those CPU frequency scaling bugs were fixed. However, Dr. Scheme had poorly written C code that required custom compile options. I got my work done in Windows. From May until December I used Windows 7 RC. It was where I was able to do everything in an easy and quick way. Most importantly, I was ahead of the technology curve with the elegant UI (now KDE users are beginning to copy it). I installed Sabayon 5.1 again over the past Christmas break:

This one definitely deserved a version bump as the developers switched from -Os to -O2. -O2 is generally faster, but -Os is always smaller, in terms of compiled programs. This was great, as my CPU fan was used a lot less. I rarely hear it now after a few tweaks. Moreover, this is the first time I used Linux continuously over a month for over a year. Congratulations to Sabayon! More details about each release for those who want to compare what truly matters to a user with what Sabayon has provided through its history:

Sabayon Linux 3.3 x86/x86-64: Press Release

Sabayon Linux x86/x86-64 3.4: Stable Release

Sabayon Linux x86/x86-64 3.5: Stable Release

Sabayon Linux x86/x86-64 4 Revision 1 Rolling Release

Sabayon Linux 5.1-r1 GNOME and KDE: Stable release

I made a post on Sabayon forums summarizing performace tweaks:

http://forum.sabayon.org/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=19762&p=112208&sid=112bbd1996b44132eb064c48c3a460e8#p112208

Update: Now it is in the Sabayon Wiki.

How to make Sabayon run faster

Just finished my last exam and now’s the time to update all my outdated software!

The plan is to leave my XP installation that came with the laptop and wipe out everything else. Does that mean Atlantis will be destroyed and civilization has to be rebuilt again? (Who just asked that!) Not that Windows 7 Release Candidate has gone stale, it expires sometime next year. In the past 3 life cycles, I have focused on heterogenous software configurations.

1. XP should have Spore and custom theming
2. Linux distributions should be either user-friendly or technology focused (Ubuntu and Sabayon)
3. Vista with Google Chrome and Gadgets

The basic principle behind this new installation is to keep every system I use consistent. This implies keeping the user interface the same. Several things to achieve this effect:

1. FEBE and CLEO Firefox extensions to mass install all extensions and profiles
2. Firefox as the general purpose browser
3. Font smoothing (yeah Linux and XP have them)
4. KDE as Linux desktop (the destop effects in Vista can be duplicated, and it’s closer to Windows desktop than GNOME)
5. Speed up the slowest part of my user experience (loading a web page in Ubuntu)

If you want to make your system rock solid it’s a long process, but you have to do it sooner or later.

1. This step is optional if you know how to edit USE flags. http://www.gentoo-wiki.info/Euse
2. add glibc-omitfp and nptonly to your USE flages in /etc/make.conf.                                        www.gentoo-wiki.info/HOWTO_Optimise_glibc#Enabling_further_optimizations
3. if your are keen and want to save 90% of the space taken up by localization settings and some compile time, edit the locales. nano -w /etc/locale.gen http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/guide-localization.xml
4. delete unnecessary languages
5. emerge glibc
6. still staying very basic,  add -malign-double to your CFLAGS, and test it by emerging dillo. www.gentoo-wiki.info/CFLAGS_matrix

Type dillo at the console and press enter.

Tryout the powersave or “standby” in windows.
http://powersave.sourceforge.net/kpowersave/introduction.html#starting

If you still have time, you might like stable transparencies.
http://fluxbox-wiki.org/index.php/Transparency

Do not use kuroo or emerge before completing the following steps :

Simply the console or terminal, type the commands, and hit enter.

su –

sabayon (sudo passwd to change)

emerge –sync

emerge portage

dispatch-conf

u (update)

layman -S

glsa-check -f all

dispatch-conf

u (update)

http://wiki.sabayonlinux.org/index.php?title=Tips

If you are bored with the above, start with detecting your hardware.

cat /proc/cpuinfo

http://www.gentoo-wiki.info/Detecting_your_Hardware

nano -w /etc/make.conf                NOTE: ^ is ctrl

http://gentoo-wiki.info/Safe_Cflags

I’ve just spent the last few days at home on reading week (It’s called that because that’s the last thing you want to do yet the first thing that you should do on spring break.) It hasn’t been a much of a week as far as getting thing done. I’ve spent the first few days chasing the karmic tail. First, I decided not to bring home my ReadyBoost USB for Vista as I anticipated using XP or Linux. I was mostly exited about my Fedora 10 installation because I haven’t used it much. 5 days max. And I wanted to use a 64 bit OS. By the time I think about it now, I can’t tell if Fedora was faster than XP or Vista, but I do remember it crashing in Gnome with Compiz and KDE4 with its effects. It’s official. Anything on Google’s official (at least as soon as you find out). Everything else don’t make a difference. (Actually, everything else worked fine in Fedora except…) I’ve been an old Sabayon user (more on that later), and I trust it a lot more than some pet project of Red Hat that charges money for the better bug fixed Red Hat Enterprise and sabotages the most innovative Linux projects to crush competition (more on that again, but here’s a hint just to remind myself). Yeah, so I have been chasing the garbage tail (er… a tail of garbage?) since I got opinionated about the OS I use. There’s even a great divide between XP users and Vista lovers (not to say anything about my dad’s preference to keep 2000 on an old machine). It’s all garbage. I mean the garbage code in PLT Scheme! If it wasn’t for that and a slight problem with suspend that I’ve just figured out from Google, I’d still be using Sabayon. But as the story goes, it started this way:
XP -> Sabayon -> Dark XP -> ____ -> Sabayon -> XP -> Sabayon -> Vista -> Sabayon -> Kubuntu -> Vista -> Sabayon -> Kubuntu (next time)
Ah, good thing I kept an album of my old desktops on facebook.