Last night I decided to give Sabayon 4.1 a try and installed it on a partition of my hard drive that also hosts Ubuntu and Fedora. The install went on smoothly and the new system seemed very nice. Fine, I switched off the computer and give it a rest.
When I went back to Ubuntu I opened Firefox and I noticed that something was wrong. My bookmarks were still there but my profile seemed to miss something. The home page was now "www.sabayonlinux.org" and all my other home page tabs were lost! I opened Seamonkey and I got the same problem, home page as "www.sabayonlinux.org" and worse, I couldn't open my Mail, Seamonkey keeping on asking me to create a new account.
I went to see about Fedora on another partition and Firefox was also showing "www.sabayonlinux.org" as its home page. I do not share profiles on Firefox, I only have a big Home partition where I do store my homes of the different distros, using different user names.
What went wrong? Is Sabayon trying to interfere with other installs forcing all browsers around to have "www.sabayonlinux.org" as home page? Or is it a bug of the new file sytem ext4 that I'm using on Ubuntu, Fedora and Sabayon?
Whatever happened, I could get back my mail thanks to a backup. The culprit was the file "pref.js" that was completely messed up by ...who? Sabayon? ext4?
When I tried to get back to Sabayon, grub complained about an Error 13 and I could never get Sabayon started again. I don't think I will ever try this distro again.
It would be interesting to know if anyone else had these same problems.

It could be interesting to took at your /etc/fstab's for both distros. Maybe they are sharing the $HOME directory or something.

Thanks for your suggestion, but I found a link "sabayon distrubs other linux installations!":
http://forum.sabayonlinux.org/viewto...rtition#p91183. that confirmed that I've not gone mad and the culprit was Sabayon. I think nobody WANT any system to change any files on a different distro.
This Sabayon behaviour is unacceptable and should be qualified as MALWARE. Most of us have run away from Micro$oft, we don't need a distro who behave like them, forcing people to have their home page on every browser, dictating and messing up prefs.js files, putting labels on partitions without asking....
Sorry for the guys behind Sabayon, the distro seemed very nice but I will never ever re-install Sabayon on my hard drive as long as this issue will not been solved.
I will also post on other Linux forums to warn people, and invite them to make a backup of their important files if they really insist on installing Sabayon.
This is really the first time I've seen a Linux distro having such a bad M$-like behaviour!

I can't open that link, I am not registered at that forum and it complains because of that. Weird.

It would be unacceptable, indeed.

Uhuh?
may be try my post:
http://forum.sabayonlinux.org/viewto...p?f=86&t=17250

Yep. That one is visible. It seems that the side effect wasn't intentional and they are working to fix it. That's a good thing.

Still I don't like the fact that a distro writes *anything* on my home directory. Everything under /home should be completely forbidden to the package manager and the rest of installation scripts. That what /etc/skel is for. Existing users shouldn't even be disturbed under any circumstance. And much less without warning

By default the sabayon anaconda installer will move your home directory during install, for example, my home folder /home/v00d00 will get replaced with a "default" /home/v00d00 and the original will be move to /home/v00d00.original, you can easily move it back if needed, this is done as we install a number of default files to make life simpler for the user and add the extra gloss over the default gentoo defaults, as well as installing said files in skel. Helps with the works out of the box approach.

Hi Bobzr,

I can understand your frustration and your comments:
Nobody likes his main system to be screwed up, I agree.
However you did not post any details how you performed your installation, so how did you deal with your partitions? It would be nice to know that, so that other people would know how not to run into problems.

I am also confident that Sabayon team would make a fix. I have been a Sabayon user since 2006 and their forum is one of the most efficient and polite forums around. If you think what happened is a real problem, why not ask on the Sabayon forum if this is going to be fixed? Did you ask? I am sure they would be willing to help.

Critising is very easy to do.

I have been a Mandriva user in the past, but ever since I switched to Sabayon I did not have any need to use any others, like Ubuntu, etc. Sabayon is for me one of the best distros around.

I also never tried more than one distro on one computer. This is because I would consider it very risky even if there are distros that can do it. If I was to do something like that I would use and old computer to test such a situation. I would never do it on a computer where all my important data is. You cannot expect every distro to work in the same way. I would also strongly recommend backing up your /home on a daily basis. For me it's a must and I do it every day. Especially before any major system changes.

Remember, you get a Linux system for free and people :
a) make mistakes
b) developers sometimes mess up things
b) people produce their distros based on a core distros - Sabayoon is based on Gentoo, so maybe this is a gentoo problem?


Regards,
Richard

Gentoo wouldn't ever touch a single file in your $HOME directory. I can tell you.

Even more, Gentoo is all about control, so in more general and global terms, it WILL NEVER do anything that you didn't ask it to do.

Thank you all for your comments and suggestions, I'm new here and I'm pleasantly surprised by the quality and friendly feedback of this forum members.
Of course, writing to the Sabayon forum was the first thing I did, the links are on other posts of this thread. I would like to point out that I'm not criticising anybody. I simply thought that talking about the problems I had with Sabayon could help someone else. It's more frequent to post questions or negative experiences we have, because we want a feedback from others, and this can also be very useful to the developers who wants to improve their work. But I promise I will post more positive events in this forum in a new future!
By the way, the guys at Sabayon said all the problems I related will be fixed with version 4.2
wait & see!