Planet Sabayon Linux

Just committed the three ebuilds, the first is app-emulation/virtualbox-bin-3.0.0 and the second is app-emulation/vitualbox-modules-3.0.0 and finally app-emulation/virtualbox-guest-additions.

I may add the  OSE but I haven’t seen anyone using that recently, so it got left out this time.

This are in the overlay right now and support lots of cool stuff such as SMP (Multiple Virtual CPUs) to guest operating systems, plus guests are now able to access OpenGL 2.0 with hardware acceleration on supported hardware / drivers.

These will hopefully be in mainline entropy after the normal testing process, if you want then now you can simply emerge them.

Sabayon 4.2 will catch you: just the best of the Out-Of-The-Box, GNOME, multimedia applications and nothing more than what you need for your daily tasks, but what about your free time? We’ve got it. XBMC (formerly known as Xbox Media Center) 9.04 is what you’ve ever wanted to build up a fantastic HTPC or Internet Multimedia Box, so what’s better than having it ready to use? Show off the new Sabayon Linux to your friends, they have no more excuses to not try it!

Distribution Features:
• Based on Sabayon 4.1 GNOME, containing hundreds of bug fixes and performance improvements
• <2GB ISO footprint
• Custom Linux Kernel 2.6.29
• Ext4 as default filesystem
• Complete GNOME 2.26.2 flavour
• OpenOffice 3.1
• Compiz and Compiz Fusion 0.8.4
• X.Org 7.4 supporting AMD and NVIDIA latest video cards
• Multimedia applications (audio, video, dvd ripping, file sharing)
• Media Center Mode, transforming your Sabayon in a complete Multimedia platform thanks to XBMC
• Entropy Package Manager 0.96.26 (ready for 1.0!)
• World of Goo Demo – best 2D game ever!
• Sexiest Skin ever!
• Ready for Sabayon 5!

Major Changes since Sabayon 4.1:
• [System] Environment in sync with latest available Entropy updates
• [System] Featuring Entropy Framework (Package Manager) 0.96.26, improved performance, reduced hardware requirements
• [System] Featuring the new user-friendly Entropy Graphical Interface, Sulfur
• [System] GNOME updated to 2.26.2
• [System] OpenOffice updated to 3.1.0
• [System] XBMC updated to 9.04 supporting NVIDIA “vdpau” video acceleration
• [Live] Improved boot performance significantly
• [Live] Improved GPU hardware detection and reliability (esp. for: NVIDIA, NVIDIA legacy, Catalyst, RadeonHD, Intel)
• [Live] Fixed a GDM issue causing X server to be respawned
• [Live] Featuring latest NVIDIA(185.14)/AMD(9.62) Graphics Drivers
• [Live] Improved PulseAudio support
• [Install] Significantly reduced hard-disk requirements
• [Install] Fixed text-based installation
• [Install] Installer now checks for available /boot space
• [Install] Installer now allows to share /home partitions across distributions and reinstallations
• [Install] Installer UI now got refreshed correctly
• [Install] Improved user home configuration (if $HOME is already available, it won’t be touched)
• [Install] Several other minor bug fixes

Requirements
Minimum requirements:
- an i686-compatible Processor (Intel Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Celeron, AMD K6-2, Athlon)
- 512Mb RAM
- 10 GB of free space
- A X.Org supported 2D GPU
- a DVD reader
Optimal requirements:
- a Dual Core Processor (Intel Core 2 Duo or better, AMD Athlon 64 X2 or better)
- 1024Mb RAM
- 32 GB of free space
- A X.Org supported 3D GPU (Intel, AMD, NVIDIA) (esp. for XBMC)
- a DVD reader

Release Notes

Many fully fledges distros have drawn praise for bringing something new to the linux arena, while relying on the solid foundation of a mother distro, Mint, for example, is based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian. Sabayon is based on Gentoo; PCLinuxOS on Mandrivia so on and so forth.

There has been much comment in the community about these new distros taking the mother distros work, adding to it and pushing out releases without passing those additions back to the mother distro. In many ways  this is still happening, new distros come out each and every day which is a serious misallocation of reasources, I mean seriously how many different variants do you need? Devleopers will add a few packages change the wallpaper and claim it’s a new distro, which its not, sorry, Yes im talking to you Ubuntu scientology edition et al.

What I see is a worrying trend, that rather than becoming package maintainers for upstream packages developers often create small personal repos, helped in part by PPAs / overlay overuse, which means that effort gets divided and there are often duplicate packages, an older version in the main tree with its own maintainer and the newer version with more features and bug fixes in some obscure repository somewhere with a different maintainer.

There were claims earlier in its history that Ubuntu was doing similar, adding custom patches and only maintaining a small subset of the overall tree, while not offering those changes upstream. Nowadays the communication is better and the Debian developers seem relatively positive about Ubuntu.

Obviously we will never see the kinds of contributions that Redhat or Novell bring to linux and opensource from Ubuntu / Canocal as they have said they are not interested in doing it publically, but do the hundreds of small fixes as in their “papecuts” marketing gimmick make their way upstream?

A similar thing with Sabayon was claimed in the early days there seemed to be a bit of hostility from certain members of the Gentoo community about what Sabayon was doing.  This situation has improved dramatically in recent months, communication with upstream has improved, both reporting bugs and providing patches, Gentoo devs are often seen hanging around on sabayon channels and vice versa. Lxnay, the lead developer for Sabayon is now an official Gentoo developer. Joost the Entropy maintainer is working closely with both the KDE and Gnome herds to iron out issues with the latest release of both desktop environments.

The Sabayon team always desired to be working closer to upstream with the belief that together we are stronger, and that by having a more desktop and user focused Gentoo it would improve the Gentoo experience for a lot of users, and I think that extends to all of open source in general, if we all worked together in a harmonious way we could do anything, but its open source, so it will never happen, the status quo of its greatest strength and greatest weakness.

Lately I have been quite busy with many different (usually sabayon-related) things. A main focus is trying to come up with a a nice theme for 5.0, which is is proving interesting to say the least.

For the mean time however I have created some artwork for the CoreCD, which I have dubbed “Sabayon.Core”. The core CD is targetted at intermediate users who want to build their system as they see fit. It is designed to “sabayon-infy” a gentoo stage 3 by providing an simple text based installer and up to date packages, as well as a solid core upon which you can build with either entropy or portage. The work Mitch is doing on this is great, it still amazes me what the sabayon community is doing with so few real “devs” working on it.

So, without further adieu, a preview image for the Sabayon.Core v1. o  bootsplash / fbsplash theme:

Image is CC-SA-A-v3.0 Ian Whyman 2009

The dark red and black is homage to the 3.3 / 3.4 black and “blood” red and is supposed to be clean and classy and suitably dark for use a terminal background, a user on IRC commented that it looks like a red curtain, which didnt occur to me at the time.

Yesterday I pushed 3 new firefox versions into the sabayon overlay, “whats so great about these firefoxes?” I hear you ask, well there are a few things.

Firstly they branded correctly as “Sabayon” which means sites that pick up on what OS your using will show you as usiong Sabayon and not Gentoo. For example on my blog, when you post a comment you will get a little Sabayon logo by your comment! (had to patch the wordpress plugin, but it has been accepted upstream now)

Secondly they now use the Sabayon homepage as default, not gentoo.org, which means in theory we could remove the firefox profile from skel (and have one less thing to worry about). However skel also has some setting to make sure Flash and Java work OOTB so maybe not a good idea to that just yet, but we will see.

Finally, there are newer versions! woop! By default everyone will get an upgrade to firefox 3.5_rc2 (-r10). However there is still an older (stabler) version of 3.0.11(-r10) available for those who dont want to run a RC browser.

For the brave there is also a bleeding edge 9999(-r1) ebuild which pulls the very latest code directly from the mozilla repository. I use the 9999 build with 0 problems. Please report any issues you encounter with these new builds to the sabayon bugzilla.

4.2 is chugging along with testing nicley and the testers have just got a pre-alpha of the CoreCD version too.  As always keep an eye on planet for the latest updates

v00d00.net is back on-line!

Please be patient while I rebuild the site….

It may take a while, but I will try to keep this updated and move all my stuff to one central place!

In the mean time please check out the Sabayon site

Well, we have been making progress on the Sabayon Live CD. I should say, Mitch has been making progress on the Sabayon Live CD. A person really starts to feel the pressure of dependencies when making a cd. We have our first cd ready for the beta testers team. We don’t have a release date for the CD yet and only people that have access to it is the beta testers, so have some patience as we hammer away at it and get it ready for release. Remember, this release will be nothing like before. This release will not be for noobs. This release is all command line interface, there is no gui and you have to build it on your own. The cd will get you up and running with the necessities to do an install and leave you with only a command line. You will build it the way you want to via entropy or portage. Entropy and Portage are both working OOTB so fear not about that. Entropy will get you a desktop pretty quick, but you are still responsible for setting up all the configurations.

My first test and I had it installed in 15 minutes, course that doesn’t include any GUI, just the corecd itself. First thing I did after install was emerge –sync and than equo update to get my package managers up and ready to go. For basically an alpha release, it’s pretty darn good. I include some screenshots of what we have so far.

Boot Menu – First Screen (Keep in mind graphics may change in final release)

Booting Up

Booted Up

Installed and running

Told ya, no pretty stuffs but a beautiful command line. We will continue to test this and hopefully get this out to the public shortly. Oh, you can click the images for bigger pic also. The first one doesn’t have a larger image.

Stay Tuned!

Well, we have been making progress on the Sabayon Live CD. I should say, Mitch has been making progress on the Sabayon Live CD. A person really starts to feel the pressure of dependencies when making a cd. We have our first cd ready for the beta testers team. We don’t have a release date for the CD yet and only people that have access to it is the beta testers, so have some patience as we hammer away at it and get it ready for release. Remember, this release will be nothing like before. This release will not be for noobs. This release is all command line interface, there is no gui and you have to build it on your own. The cd will get you up and running with the necessities to do an install and leave you with only a command line. You will build it the way you want to via entropy or portage. Entropy and Portage are both working OOTB so fear not about that. Entropy will get you a desktop pretty quick, but you are still responsible for setting up all the configurations.

My first test and I had it installed in 15 minutes, course that doesn’t include any GUI, just the corecd itself. First thing I did after install was emerge –sync and than equo update to get my package managers up and ready to go. For basically an alpha release, it’s pretty darn good. I include some screenshots of what we have so far.

Boot Menu – First Screen (Keep in mind graphics may change in final release)

Booting Up

Booted Up

Installed and running

Told ya, no pretty stuffs but a beautiful command line. We will continue to test this and hopefully get this out to the public shortly. Oh, you can click the images for bigger pic also. The first one doesn’t have a larger image.

Stay Tuned!

Now that we released both 4.1 Gnome and KDE, we started working on next releases of Sabayon.
So we publish here the roadmap for next Sabayon releases, as we planned. As always, dates can change without notice. It’s more important for us to give you a stable release.
Stay tuned!

The Sabayon Core Staff

Well, Sabayon Linux has had the KDE and Gnome 4.1 mini dvds out for a while now.  Things are rolling along still, even tho the blog has been kinda quiet.  Lets see if I can pass on some useful information for yas.

One thing you will be seeing soon is a Road Map of upcoming releases.  You will be able to see when to expect a new release.  All I ask that people don’t come screaming cause we went past our release date.  We don’t have a great track record of releasing on the day we say we are gonna.  So please use the dates as a guideline of when to expect releases.

We want to work closer with gentoo devs.  We have a good and healthy relationship going there and it’s a win win situation for everyone.  We only want what is best for everyone.

So where is the core-cd?  It’s coming, sorry it’s taking so long, but we ran into a few bumps and hopefully we can now get it going and out to you shortly.  Don’t_Panic will be the one working on it, so please have some patience for him as it will be worth it.

We’ve decided to included WICD on the discs as an option now.  NetworkManager will still be default, but for those that hate or have issues with NM, WICD will be there for you to use also.  For me, WICD does what I want hassle free, for some they need the abilities of NM, so at least you can have a choice without having to download and transfer from another machine to get WICD.

Sabayon Linux 4.2 will be the next release, it will be just an updated system, no new options.  So instead of having to download 4.1 and go through all the updates in the package manager, you will just download 4.2 and be updated to current branch 4.  If you have 4.1 installed and have it world updated, you will have the exact same thing.  There will be an artwork package for 4.2 with the same color schemes, just some minor changes. TheVoodoo is hammering that out as we speak.

Branch 5 will be starting in June and will contain the KDE 4.3 series.  As far as I know, the branch 4 will be able to roll on to branch 5, you will just have to edit the repo config file when the time comes.  More information will come out on that when it’s ready.  So branch 4 will  get to KDE 4.2.4 and than things will focus on branch 5.

Lots of work to be done as you can see.  I also want to let everyone know that Sabayon Linux gave a slide presentation recently and you can find the English and Italian versions to view.

Well, lets see how we do with all this and we’ll keep ya updated as much as possible.