The last couple of weeks I have been working on Sabayon, an application that some other Red Hat people started on earlier this year. Its an editor for user profiles, where you can set up settings and add files for a class of users and easily push them out to users. Today I released version 2.12.1, which has a bunch of fixes and new features.
The interesting thing about Sabayon is the way you edit the profile. Instead of using a completely new interface it uses the standard interface you normally use. This is accomplished by launching an actual desktop inside a window, letting you make your changes in that desktop and then save it. You can also look at the changes that has happened in the session and ignore some of them, or make some of them mandatory.
Just describing Sabayon isn’t doing it justice though. To really see how this is different from other similar things you have to see it in action. So, I prepared a screencast
of it.
Once you’ve finished editing your profile it will be stored as a zip file with xml metadata that can easily be applied to a user by running the sabayon-apply tool. There is also support for deploying the profiles from a central http server.
I think this is a really cool app, but I’m a programmer, not really an administrator. I wonder what system administrators think of this? Is it an interesting approach? Is it better than what you’re using currently? Would you use this?
If you want to test Sabayon I recommend you use version 2.12.1. Its currently building in Fedora extras, so it should be available soon.