Welcome to SabayonLinux: the fully installable, live distro - http://www.sabayon.org
This short introduction will tell you a little about what exactly you downloaed and how you can use it simply and where to get more help.
What Did I Download?
First of all, you downloaded either a dvd or cd sized iso in which you burned to disk. This is a live distro which means that when you boot from disk, a fully functional operating system will be at your finger tips.
SabayonLinux is based on the source-based distro named Gentoo - http://gentoo.org. Gentoo is a highly customizable distro which we have use as our base and using their excellent development technics, we have created a pre-configured distrobution with the tenants of Performance, Versatility, and Stability. If you have any more question about what Gentoo is and its philosophy, please visit their website.
Performance: We have modified make.conf to insure that our distrobution runs at the highest speed possible on newer computer hardware and fast on semi-older hardware. As such, our distrobution is not meant to be run on Pentium Pros, although it is entirely concievable.
Versatility: Again, we have modifed make.conf to give nice wide range of features for all computers. We have also compiled the kernel to run well against most of the archietures out there while still leaving plenty of room for performance and, as always, the ability to change anything at your desire.
Stability: While many would call the distrobution extremely experimental, we give options. You can boot up with xgl to have xgl autoset up and installed, or you can boot with gentoo legacy and have a very conservative system. Also, being built upon the strengths of Gentoo, you know you're getting a rock solid distrobution worthy to slam with processor and ram intensive jobs while having the OS run smoothly.
How Do I Use It?
Installation
For our installer, we've choosen to migrate and customize the wonderful Anaconda installer by the Fedora Core team. The installer is essicientally a dvd to hard drive copy with features. You can pick and choose the packages you want or you can install the whole thing. You can also choose to attemp to rescue the system, or just your bootloader. Another great thing his that you can just simply Upgrade your system if you have an older SabayonLinux installation that you'd rather not have to start completely over with, only the core files will be upgraded.
So How do I use It?
Great question...but there are many different ways to answer that. First, we'll start off by telling you that SabayonLinux is a KDE centric distrobution that uses kdm as our manager. We have many other Desktop chooses however that you are more than welcome to sample. There is no Start menu, but KDE and Windows(R) do mimic each other in that they have the same program chooser structure. Except that KDE breaks it down into useful categories to easily find stuff.
For those of you familiar with CLI, you'll be right at home and have no problem navigating the system. If you use XGL, you'll have compiz as a window decorator and have some really nifty effects. If not, you will have a highly customized KDE desktop with custom artwork and theme.
Package Management
Being based off of Gentoo, we use the package manager Portage. For more information on what it exactly it is and its philosophy and inner working, a great place to start would be http://www.gentoo-wiki.org/Portage. In a nutshell, portage holds the records of all the ebuilds that are available for one to download and install software and have portage be able to manage it. Also, for all proper ebuilds, there is not such thing as dependency hell in SabayonLinux. But to see this a bit more, let's go through a few commands.
First of all, the following CLI commands I will be giving should be done as the Root user. You need to type su and then your password they you set. Also, a GUI counterpart to this is Kuroo which is installed by default. For more information http://www.kuroo.org.
To search for a new or existing
$ emerge -s gentoo-sources
Searching
[ Results for search key : gentoo-sources ]
[ Applications found : 2 ]
* sys-kernel/gentoo-sources
Latest version available: 2.6.17-r7
Latest version installed: 2.6.17-r7
Size of files: 40,538 kB
Homepage: http://dev.gentoo.org/~dsd/genpatches
Description: Full sources including the gentoo patchset for the 2.6 kernel tree
License: GPL-2
* sys-kernel/reiser4-gentoo-sources
Latest version available: 2.6.17-r1
Latest version installed: 2.6.17-r1
Size of files: 41,128 kB
Homepage: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Reiser4_With_Gentoo-Sources
Description: Full sources including the gentoo patchset and the reiser4 patchset for the 2.6
kernel tree
License: GPL-2
This shows that I have the most up to date sources to use for updating my kernel in my current portage snapshot from gentoo mirrors. To update that snapshot, and therefore to see if there are newer packages out there, perform:
$ emerge --sync
Now remember, that we also use Overlays which are basically mini portages that have ebuilds of their own to offer and work with the emerge command just the same. To update your overlays to the newest packages available there, perform the following:
$ layman -S
Then to actually install some package where the first command will pretend to emerge, and the second will actually install, perform:
$ emerge -pav <packagename>
$ emerge -av <packagename>
To remove a packge, again pretending to first, you can perform the following:
$ emerge -pC <packagename>
$ emerge -C <packagename>
These are but a few of the possible emerge commands and you can always read more. However, these will be the most often used.
Also, many people will talk to you about your USE flags and masked and unmasked packages, which you will eventually encounter. For a beginner, most likely you won't have to encounter them, but occassionally something will either block a package or something is masked, in which you aren't enabled to install that package. It is advisable to confide in more experienced users first, but some good places to start http://www.gentoo-wiki.org/USE and http://www.gentoo-wiki.org/Tip_Dealing_With_Masked_Packages.
Back to the Basics
So just to remind a few of some of the more important commands, I will review those here. Any of these commands you can find more about online. Remember, that most of these commands have GUI alternatives and you will feel right at home. But as should be said: Don't Fear the Command Line Interface.
To read the manual on a program or certain topic:
# man <program>
# apropos <subject>
To read the output of what's in a directory
# ls /dir
To paste the output of a file onto the CLI
# cat filename.ext
To get to a new directory
# cd /path/to/dir
To figure autocomplete a name or command
Press tab once. Tab twice will give you all options.
To figure out where you are
# pwd
And on and on and on. There are hundreds of tips and tricks that you will learn as you use SabayonLinux more in your day to day activities.
Windows to Linux Alternatives
So another common questions for users is what are the Linux alternatives to Window's software. Here is a very small list of day to day activities. Remember, since SabayonLinux is KDE centric, some of these may also be.
Windows
IE
Outlook
IRC
AIM
WinAmp
Command
Firewall
Wireless
Linux
Firefox
Thunderbird
Konversation
Kopete
AmaroK
Konsole
Firestarter
Knetworkmanager
For a more comprehensive list you can check: http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Linux_software_equivalent_to_Windows_software
I STILL NEED MORE HELP!
Never to fear. This little introduction is just to get your feet in the water and give you some general knowledge so you'll start to understand. Linux is about harnessing the power of the community to help you. Here are but a few avenues to get help from.
Websites: http://sabayon.org http://forums.gentoo.org http://gentoo-wiki.org
IRC: #Sabayon @ irc.oftc.net | Archives of chat: http://irclog.sabayon.fr
Forum: http://lxnaydesign.net/forum/