Planet Sabayon Linux

Maybe I didn’t write this in enough different places beside Twitter, Facebook, IRC, identi.ca, …. Well, see you there!

Of course I needed something to talk about with other guys at Gentoo, Sabayon, Tracker, Itsme. So, I just implemented the first version of the Entropy PackageKit backend. This is the first step towards World domination (read: making Entropy a PackageKit service provider in one year).

Get this nice screenshot while it’s hot (KPackageKit running on top of Entropy PackageKit backend):

Wow, feels like I haven’t blogged in a long time.  Time is flying by with the new year heading into February already.  I decided I would take a look at 5.1 x86 KDE edition since it’s been a long time since I have messed with x86 and KDE.  I slotted myself some time, which was my first mistake as I was rushed to it and it came back to bite me.  Silly mistakes when rushed can turn something into a much longer ordeal.  I’ll give you the details.

Booted up the iso and everything was working out of the box and so I kicked the installer in and updated it and went ahead with my install.  I did a manual partition with reiserfs and of course told it to skip the bootloader as I already have grub setup.  After install I went in and edited my grub.conf file and here is where it got me.  Being lazy I took the line above it from my MCE x86_64 line and copied and pasted it.  I did change the kernel so it was . 31 from .32, but that was it.  You see what is going to happen?  My paths are all pointing to a correct kernel of the x86_64 path.  I tell it to reboot and this is where my troubles start.

As it reboots I am not paying attention and soon get the KDM login screen and I log in, but my resolution is all wrong.  I copy over my existing xorg.conf that works fine and checked with my eselect opengl list and had to changed it to nvidia.  I restart xdm and there I sit at a black screen with a blinking cursor.  I check the Xorg log and it says nvidia not loaded.  I thought ok, let’s reboot and upon reboot I get greeted with the same blank screen and this time I noticed on boot about a bunch of stuff having issues.  So than I start to think maybe nvidia driver is not installed properly and fire up equo update and it spits out at me it can’t connect.  Odd, networking worked fine on the live version.  I run net-setup and it can’t find a single network device.  Now I am thinking, is my kernel compiled without the drivers, no that wouldn’t make sense.  I’m digging through the gentoo networking documentation now and nothing is making sense.  After an hour of scratching my head I noticed on one of the reboots that my host was saying x86_64.  So I head back into grub.conf file and start looking at the line.  Sure enough my root (x,x) was point to my 64 bit install, argh!  Edited that and rebooted into my desktop.  This is what happens when a person gets lazy and doesn’t pay attention.

Next goal was to get the latest entropy system.  This is critical for anyone that is installing a 5.1 system.  The method that works best for this is to equo update to get the repositories updated than do equo install entropy equo sulfur –relaxed as that will pull in the needed files without the 100+ other updates. I should mention that I did add the limbo repo also.  Now I got the latest entropy system and since Fabio has been riding me about how fantastic the new Sulfur is I thought fine, I would do the upgrade/world with Sulfur and see what happens.  I’ve never been a fan of Sulfur as I prefer the terminal, but I do have to admit, Sulfur is looking pretty good.  The updates tab was showing my something like 300+ updates, but was kinda confused as how to select em all as I didn’t want to go down each line and select upgrade.  I hit Ctrl + a and it selected em all and than left clicked on a package and than right click and marked upgrade.  It kinda paused for a moment after that, but it did select all for upgrade after that.  I went over to actions and committed it and waited for it to download and install all packages.  I did have to ok some licenses, but Sulfur completed the task with no problems.  I don’t recall seeing a equo conf update tho, so I ran that and had a couple minor files to update.  Time to reboot and see how all went.  Well upon reboot I get the kdm login, but the desktop won’t load at all.  I could alt +  F2 and run applications tho, so it was just the KDE desktop not loading.  I couldn’t find any thing that was pointing to an obvious solution.  For the heck of it I decided to do an equo install kde-meta and noticed it wanted to pull 229 packages.  I thought that was odd as I had just did the updates and there was no more to get.  So I did the kde-meta install and rebooted and was greeted with the full blown KDE upon logging in.  I kept  getting WICD popping up and wanting a password, which I didn’t have before, so I removed WICD as I wanted NM for testing.  I see on the forum others are posting about this too.  I thought everything was going good till I tried amarok and had no sound than it dawned on me that KDE usually has a start up tune and I hadn’t heard that.  I fired up a browser and had sound in flash along with VLC, and XBMC.  I went into System-Settings – sound and bumped my soundcard to the top of the list on everything but still nothing.  There was no pulseaudio in there tho.  Issuing the command as user pulseaudio -k brought back all the sounds.  I still don’t know what is up with that, but it will be looked into.

I believe now everything is running good.  I encourage everyone to check out the latest Sulfur and the git one actually has more new features that will be coming in.  Incase you missed it, entropy now has bash complete which is really sweet.  To get this up in konsole we have to make some changes to your konsole profile.

1.  Open Konsole and click on Settings to Edit Current Profile

2.  On the General tab you will see Command:  /bin/bash change that line to /bin/bash –login

3.  Let make sure it’s enabled with eselect bashcomp enable equo

4.  Now you need to kill all Bash and Konsole and restart it.  In Konsole all I did was killall -9 bash and than closed the Konsole window.  Now restart Konsole and to use it properly you need to  su - and than it will work.  Try out equo search ama <tab> <tab> and you can do same as user also, but will need to be root to install of course.  You can also enable and disable repos too, example:  equo repo enable sabayon-limbo or equo repo disable sabayon-limbo.

Next time you see Fabio, give him a big thanks for these awesome improvements.  Thanks again Fabio!

A certain subset of our users are scared by the huge amount of updates that sometimes are merged into our mainline repository (id: sabayonlinux.org) from our testing repository (id: sabayon-limbo). So last night I started to think about why this fear overcomes the “wow” factor.

It’s all about the number. Yes, the “number” of updates available. Look at other OSes (I mean, commercial ones), don’t they have the same amount of updates, in terms of “megabytes”? Last time I updated OSX I had to download around 500Mb. So, sometimes yes, it’s the same. What changes is just that ‘lil psychological number also known as “number of updates available: X”.

But what happens if such updates would be grouped into 5-6 main categories and presented as “category updates” ?
Let’s start with a fact: commercial OSes place dozens of updates into one “package”, that’s for sure. So, what about doing the same (more or less)?

But then, once again, if that’s the solution, what is it supposed to solve? Nothing. It just workarounds a psychological bug!

Simple mode + UGC icons and Drag and Drop support (just drag images, documents, files over packages and see). Of course, this is from Entropy GIT, not yet available for general consumption (read: wait for Entropy 0.99.25).

So its been a while since I’ve blogged so I thought I would take some time to let you know whats happening in Sabyon-dev-land.

Limbo users will have noticed lots of cool stuff has been added including the Phoronix Test Suite, KDE4.4RC, Emesene 1.6 as well as the usual swathes of updates. These updates  will ofcourse mature into Sabayon 5.2, so what can you expect? Highlights are:

• Sabayon 2.6.32 kernel
• Xorg 1.7
• KDE 4.4
• GRUB2
• Smaller ISOs due to dependency clean-ups
• Sexy new theme
• And More!

A 5.2 beta is due to be created soon and given out to our testers team,  the the main hold up is due to ATI not releasing a driver compatible with Xorg 1.7, we are undecided whether we are going to drop the binary ati-drivers in favour of the more reliable as nearly as complete open source ati driver, your opinion is needed here :).

So many things to look forward to there. We are looking for suggestions on ways to improve the disks so post a comment if you have a wishlist!

3 years. 3 candles.

Another interesting Sulfur Love <3 <3 day has gone. Here are the results (simple and advanced mode shown)

Here you can see some snapshots of Sulfur from GIT (master branch, our Entropy development repository). You should notice the refreshed & simplified UI (especially in non-Advanced mode — shots 2 and 3). The old search bar has been replaced with a shiny modern live filter bar. Other annoyances have been fixed too. The “System Files” tab automatically hides if there’s nothing to show, also.

More to come…

As you all may have seen, I’ve been really busy lately producing some very awaited new releases together with our small but powerful development team.

So, we’re close to 2010 and Entropy is about to celebrate its third birthday. It’s been a very long road, full of obstacles but hey, we’re getting closer to 1.0! 2010 will be the year of Entropy 1.0 bringing a basic set of features and ideas tossed into the wild software jungle.

What can we all expect from Entropy 1.0 and perhaps, 1.0+? Well, first of all let’s list some features that are not yet available for public consuption which I am working on, I mean, minor and major things. Of course, everybody could read my cryptic TODO file inside the Entropy git repo, but as written, it’s cryptic because it only has to fit my purposes, not yours .
During the end of 2009, Entropy went through a lot of refactoring and speed improvement work, not yet complete though. All the core modules have been redesigned, a lot of code (around 2 millions of line changes, I’m close to the 5000th commit) has been rewritten with beauty, coolness and ZOMG in mind. Starting from the latest entropy.graph code to entropy.cache (Entropy async on-disk cacher there). Even the equo old and dusty codebase got a rewrite. The only parts missing are Sulfur (usability & speed), entropy.client and entropy.server modules, which are set for rewrite during Entropy 0.99.40 development cycle (we’re at 0.99.19 now, getting closer to the 0.99.20 milestone).

During Christmas holidays, while studying Calculus and Algebra for January exams spin, I am focusing on adding GPG support to Entropy, which is almost complete already, I need to commit some last bits to connect my newly created entropy.security.Repository class to the rest of the world . So yeah, another cool feature is coming to town! For the paranoid part of you!

A few lines above I mentioned Sulfur, what is going to happen in 2010? Let me tell you in a few words, bring {Google Market, Apple AppStore, Nokia Ovi, You-Name-It} apps design and concept to the Linux Desktop, defining a protocol for producing $HOME resident applications and a service platform hosted @sabayon.org.

I spent 3 years to make an almost perfect rocket-science-ready package manager, now it’s time to innovate (funds apart).