I recently heard that Cuba had created their own Linux distribution, Nova.  Like many other countries with a rocky relationship with the USA (Russia, China, Iran), Cuba is wary of running their entire computer infrastructure on software developed in the USA.  As someone of Cuban ancestry, this development piqued my interested and I decided to check it out.  (I figured such a specialist distro would never be on the cover of LXF).  According to its distrowatch page, it is a mix of Gentoo, Sabayon, and Ututo.  We’ll see if they chose all of the negative aspects of those distros and thus created Satan’s Distro or if they took all that was good and created what Gentoo has the potential to be.  So I launch it up in VirtualBox.

Since both Gentoo and Sabayon were included on this Linux Format DVD, I decided I would first try and install Gentoo and then Sabayon and compare how easy the installations were since Sabayon is a derivative distro from Gentoo.  As you know, I was unable to get a working installation from the LiveCD of Gentoo.  If this was the case for most people, then the fact that they will no longer produce one is a good riddance.  Sabayon, like most of the “modern” distros (or at least Ubuntu and Fedora), display a loading screen instead of the “ok” messages.