Planet Sabayon Linux

Sabayon 8 is starting to shape up and if you are doing the updates via the package manager, you should see the new artwork implemented.  Like with any release we do, there is always a decision to be made of what stays and what goes.  This is not always an easy decision as we don’t want to cause chaos.  A tough decision was made about xorg-server-1.11, which doesn’t work with legacy nvidia cards.  We decided we can’t hold back because of that and have implemented xorg-server-1.11.  So now what?

First, if you are unsure if your card is a Nvidia legacy card, you can refer to this Nvidia page and see.  It will also explain to you what a legacy card is.

Second, you’re still in luck as the opensource Nvidia driver called Nouveau can be used to replace the package nvidia-drivers.  If you need information about what that is, check out this home page and the Gentoo wiki page. You can also see they are available in entropy and portage.  I hear really good things about Nouveau, but I have no personal experience with it.  I upgrade my hardware frequently so I’m never having to deal with such things.

Third, if your hardware is just plain old I would recommend looking at distros that are focused on older hardware.  Some of these distros would be like knoppix, puppy linux, xubuntu and crunchbag.  I actually have xubuntu that I just installed the other day on a older machine that I have.  It has the legacy fx5200 card and I found that xubuntu ran great.

We aren’t the only distro that is running into this issue with legacy cards.  A while back on my Ubuntu machine it wanted to upgrade to the latest release, but at the same time I got a big old warning box telling me that my hardware probably would not work well with it so I opt to not do it and just retire the machine for now.  I have a huge tote full of legacy stuff that I am looking at throwing out as it is no longer good for anything.  That 2400 baud modem just isn’t gonna get used again.  Even my old faithful 1x cdrom that still works isn’t gonna ever be used again.

Anyway, Sabayon 8 is looking good and I’m expecting a release in the very near future.  I think about all that is left to do is decide on the gnome 3 default desktop and a couple of bug fixes.  We are kinda leaning towards default gnome 3 with some extensions instead of Cinnamon as default.  Cinnamon is just still too alpha to go prime time.  The gnome-shell extensions really help improve the usability of gnome.  I’m interested in hearing from people what their favorite extensions are.  Look for a release announcement soon.

I’ve seen a couple of recent posts lately and the topic comes up from time to time about updates.  It’s tough to please people and updates.  It’s either too often or not enough it seems.  Personally, I don’t see what the big deal is.  There could be updates everyday, it don’t matter to me and I never question if I do an equo update and it says I’m current.  Some get a bit nervous when they don’t see updates and start thinking something is broke.  There is a simple solution to put your worries at rest.  I love RSS, borderline rss junkie even.  So all you have to do is load up your favorite rss reader and put in the package update rss.  These can be found on the mirrors.

So for example, a weekly x86_64 user can use the following link

http://pkg.sabayon.org/standard/sabayon-weekly/database/amd64/5/updates.rss

A weekly x86 user can use:

http://pkg.sabayon.org/standard/sabayon-weekly/database/x86/5/updates.rss

Now you can follow along and see when and what was all dumped into the repo.  I like to use google reader as than I can access my rss feeds from any where. Click image to make bigger.

Simple enough to put your worries to rest.  Some more feeds:

Limbo x86_64 - http://pkg.sabayon.org/standard/sabayon-limbo/database/amd64/5/updates.rss

Limbo x86 - http://pkg.sabayon.org/standard/sabayon-limbo/database/x86/5/updates.rss

Main x86_64 - http://pkg.sabayon.org/standard/sabayonlinux.org/database/amd64/5/updates.rss

Main x86 - http://pkg.sabayon.org/standard/sabayonlinux.org/database/x86/5/updates.rss

Feel free to use the mirror of your choice http://sabayon.org/mirrors RSS can also be used with our gits.  For example our

entropy git - http://gitweb.sabayon.org/?p=entropy.git;a=rss

artwork git - http://gitweb.sabayon.org/?p=artwork.git;a=rss

You can find the various git stuff here - https://git.sabayon.org/

Soon you will be collecting rss from other sites and growing your list till it’s out of control.  No excuse for not knowing what is going on.

Gnome 3 fiasco has come and gone, oh wait, it’s still here, but at least people are hacking away at it to make it a bit better.  We’ve been seeing apps to help customize the devastation and now Linux Mint has forked the default gnome-shell and started a project that gives you an option of a different shell called Cinnamon.  We have introduced the Cinnamon to the limbo repository for testing and I’ve only heard positive things about it from those that have tested it. Sabayon running Cinnamon below:

Here you can see Cinnamon with the menu system open, looks a bit rude at first, but functions quite well.

A bit busy

Pull back and select the application you want

So the great thing about this that I love is the old traditional desktop feel that I am most comfortable in.  No huge icons and drilling down through more huge icons to find an application.  The menu system gets you were you need to get quickly.  Call me old, but I enjoy the simple desktop and hate huge icons.  I’m glad to see others feel the same and are actually producing forks and hacks.  Gnome devs need to, well I’m not gonna get on that rant or I’ll be writing a book.

So what about the negatives?  Well, I’m not gonna say that there is negatives due to the fact that Cinnamon is young and new and is gonna grow quickly with changes to make it better.  Like right now the customization abilities are very limited.  The gnome-tweak-tool will allow you to make some changes.  A trick I found to do was to log into the regular gnome session and use gnome-tweak-tool to make changes and than logout and return to the cinnamon session where most things will stick.  You can’t change window borders, but I can live with that for now.  Linux Mint has already said that in the next version that customization tools are high priority.

I should clear the air here incase people are scared to screw up their gnome default by installing Cinnamon.  When you install Cinnamon it creates a new login session called Cinnamon.  So when you are at your login screen, choose Cinnamon from the session to log into it.  You can log back into regular gnome by logging out and than choose Gnome in the session.  So no fear, you won’t loose nor harm your gnome default session.  If you are using lxdm, make sure you have the latest version from limbo repo installed otherwise lxdm can’t start the session.

Sabayon needs to make some changes to it, such as branding the menu button and we will be changing the category it is in now that Gentoo has added it to portage under gnome-extra.  There is discussion about an idea of making Cinnamon the default session in Sabayon 8.  Remember the regular gnome session will be there also, so don’t go yelling at your monitor we are crazy if we do such a thing, just select Gnome for your session if you are not a Cinnamon fan.  I encourage everyone to take a look at it at least once and give it a try.  With Cinnamon available, I actually installed Gnome back on to my main system.

Happy New Year to all!  Now that the holidays are over it’s time to get back to work or unless you were like me and got to work through the holidays, so is life.

So I am continuously testing the Sabayon Forensics XFCE x86-64 edition and happy to see that things are nice and stable for me.  I haven’t heard any complaints from anyone either, so all good it seems.

I’ve been looking at this ARM stuff and slowly trying to grasp all of it.  Fabio has been busy with the ARMv7 stuff on his beagleboard. A wiki page is even been dedicated to it. If you are interested in it, be sure to see those links to learn more.  I’ve been eyeing up the Pandaboard lately as it seems to offer plenty.  If you’re interested in testing and developing, give a shout to our mail list and let us know.

Fabio is gonna take a much needed short holiday and than the plans will be set in motion to get a Sabayon 8 out the door.  The daily iso is working so well that I’m not seeing much effort needed to push this one out.  A new artwork package was talked about so will see where that ends up at.  I myself would like to see something new and refreshing.  My current desktop looks something like this:

Regardless, if you’re keeping your system up to date, you are rolling right along with the changes.  Keep up to date and keep reporting any bugs. Please see this bug for the Sabayon 8 release stuff, just append to it. We kinda want to get Sabayon 8 out the door by end of February, sooner the better.

2012 is looking good for Sabayon.  We have more people helping with the server stuff.  We got the ARM project in motion.  I’m still seeing the flow of Ubuntu refugees arriving and loving Sabayon.  It’s good to have yas onboard btw.  The recent reviews I have read have all been very positive. Also, it sounds like Fabio will be rewritting a new Sulfur from scratch for Sabayon 9 release later this year, hopefully mid-year.  So good news for the Sulfur or Entropy Store users. So stick around and invite a friend or two.

Thanks to Luca Barbato (known as lu_zero in Gentooland), I’ll be able to put my hands for some days on this nice ARM board made by Genesi, the Efika MX.

As it happened with the BeagleBone, the idea is to work out the kernel, bootloader integration and create weekly automatic builds of Gentoo and Sabayon images (those you can just cat to the MMC card). It is more or less what happens with Gentoo stage3 autobuilds, but here we have kernel binaries and u-boot, so that the image can boot straight away.

So far, qemu-user (statically compiled) + OpenSUSE patches, besides minor bugs, are working quite well. Depending on the availability of these boards on the market and project financial capabilities, we’ll be able to couple qemu-user with native hardware on the build server making them work side by side without the need of a shared binhost repo (sshfs + chroot magic, I’ll talk about it in future).

One more step for these chroots will be attaching matter to it, as we already do for i686 and x86_64 ones. This way the compilation of new ebuilds (and 70% of chroot work) will be completely automated.

One week ago, the BeagleBone I ordered from Tigal.com eventually landed on my desk. As you may know, it’s an ARMv7a OMAP device with 256Mb RAM, USB 2.0 and FastEthernet 10/100. The board doesn’t come with HDMI output but daughter boards are expected to be shipped soon it seems.

It ships with Angstrom Linux, an embedded distribution that is no way close to Gentoo, at least in my opinion. I found it kinda broken and slow. opkg, the package manager, is a nightmare. I had no choice, that thing had to be dumped ASAP. And that’s what I did.

First thing I did was copycating the Angstrom kernel configuration by copying /proc/config.gz in a safe place and starting to merge the Beagleboard kernel tree into my Linux 3.1 branch. This of course means that the AM335x is not yet supported by the vanilla kernel. Last I heard is that there are plans to merge the patches during the 3.3 merge window… You can find two ebuilds in the “sabayon-distro” overlay: sys-kernel/beagleboard-sources and sys-kernel/linux-beagleboard, providing sources and binaries respectively.
Introducing ARM support in sabayon-kernel.eclass (the eclass that builds kernel binaries using genkernel) was quite straightforward, it now builds uImages directly!

The boot strategy works like this: u-boot.img searches /boot/uImage into the root filesystem (ext4 doesn’t seem to work with my image). In our case, /boot/uImage is a symlink pointing to a versioned file (the one installed by sys-kernel/linux-beagleboard). You can manage the symlink using eselect-uimage, from the “sabayon” overlay and shipped with the Sabayon images already. This means that you can change the boot kernel at runtime without even touching the boot partition!

The second thing was setting up a chroot, both Entropy build chroot (for pushing out binary packages to the armv7l repo) and “image” chroot (the one from where images are generated) using qemu-user to emulate armv7l. In order to be able to prepare disk images using loop devices, I also completely rewrote the famous “mkcard.txt” script, dropping bc dependency (hey, bash can do math already!!). You can find it here, as well as molecules that we use to build the ARMv7a images for Beagle{Bone,Board}.

If you are interested in knowing more about how I managed to get Sabayon on ARM, have a look at the “Hitchhikers Guide to the BeagleBone” on our wiki.

I uploaded the Sabayon ARMv7 images on our mirrors this morning, under the iso/daily directory, in different sizes (depending on your MMC card size): 4GB, 8GB, 16GB.

a75fd2a7d9cae17762034c5c049a08fc Sabayon_Linux_DAILY_armv7a_Base_16GB.img.xz

0e17081050fa19c7f769318e3235ebaa Sabayon_Linux_DAILY_armv7a_Base_4GB.img.xz

56606bc906715cdebce02611ae03285c Sabayon_Linux_DAILY_armv7a_Base_8GB.img.xz

Installing them onto your MMC card is as easy as running:

xzcat <image file>.xz > /dev/sdX

Where /dev/sdX is your memory card device (might be mmcblk0).
They come in different sizes, make sure to match the advertised image size with your MMC device one.

If you have 32GB or 64GB MMCs you have two choices: either use the 16GB version and create a separate partition later or take the bootfs and rootfs images (they come in different sizes but the content is the same) from the same dir:

93960b28cde8dde51f2d29cc0c76f6bb Sabayon_Linux_DAILY_armv7a_Base_16GB.img.bootfs.tar.xz

e85fe8d344dacf79eec94562a59c6750 Sabayon_Linux_DAILY_armv7a_Base_16GB.img.rootfs.tar.xz

93960b28cde8dde51f2d29cc0c76f6bb Sabayon_Linux_DAILY_armv7a_Base_4GB.img.bootfs.tar.xz

1a6bce6f585d52f2b50806bd2bd69578 Sabayon_Linux_DAILY_armv7a_Base_4GB.img.rootfs.tar.xz

93960b28cde8dde51f2d29cc0c76f6bb Sabayon_Linux_DAILY_armv7a_Base_8GB.img.bootfs.tar.xz

13b2a47a88c55c8692ce61fc2fd42022 Sabayon_Linux_DAILY_armv7a_Base_8GB.img.rootfs.tar.xz

This way you can create your own partition layout and then unpack the content into the respective partitions. So easy. No grub nor MBR nightmare!
If you are as lazy as me, here is the download link to the directory (using the GARR mirror). But you are encouraged to use our download page to find the mirror closest to you.

The root password is: root. The OS is set to automatically boot and start eth0 and sshd (so you can connect to it via ssh). During the first boot, there is a script that configures some stuff and reboots your device automatically (so on the first boot it will just reboot). If you want to change the locale, edit /etc/env.d/02locale and run locale-gen !. The System is already configured to allow serial login (at least this works on the BeagleBone out of the box).

That’s it. You have a great distro (Gentoo) with a great Package Manager, Entropy (Sabayon) in a credit-card sized device.
If you appreciate our efforts towards the ARM architecture, please consider to donate us either hardware or MONEY to buy it! (yeah, we can’t just handle money, we always need money!).
If you’re a developer and interested in ARM stuff, why don’t you join us? We can improve both Gentoo and Sabayon together!

Please note: I only have a BeagleBone for now thus I wasn’t able to test out the images on the BeagleBoard. Moreover, the boot partition contains Beagle* related boot binaries that won’t work on other OMAP devices out of the box (but still, we provide split boot and root filesystem images).

Please note 2: I consider this a tech preview because at the time of writing, we only have 400 binary packages available for install. You can browse them using http://packages.sabayon.org.

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It’s that wonderful time of year again, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all.  I hope everyone is spending a wonderful time with family and friends and that Santa leaves you a special present if you weren’t on the naughty list.

Time has been busy for me as I have been in the process of upgrading/replacing my entertainment system to HD.  Out with the VCR and in with the Blu-ray and new TV, lots to learn before I made purchases.  My biggest goal was to get a wireless system for my videos from my hard drive to the tv.  So between handbrake converting videos to .mkv files, blu-ray player and samba, I achieve that goal.  The wireless tv and the internet apps that it has makes for a great tv.  The blu-ray player also has more internet apps, so a ton of options with just a remote.  I also have the laptop connected via dbus cable where I can launch boxee or xbmc for even more options.

I subscribed to huluplus as I am thinking of dropping my Satellite tv subscription to save some money.  Between huluplus and netflix I can continue to watch 90% of the stuff I do and save some cash.  With the cash saved, I could look at the beagleboard.  Fabio has been teasing me with pictures of his and than seeing the development work for Sabayon on beagleboard is exciting.  A dedicated beagleboard for multimedia apps sounds awesome.  So I will see what happens here.

I am very excited to inform you guys, that the number of production servers powering the whole Sabayon Linux infrastructure has grown once more.

This time it’s all about the Top-ix Consortium which is going to host our main Entropy and ISO mirror very very soon (the migration is in process right now). The same Consortium kindly donated a powerful Intel Xeon Quad Core system with 4GB RAM, quite enough for the expected load. Thanks to this, we’ll be able to reinforce pkg.sabayon.org and distfiles.sabayon.org aiming to make our users happier.

So, thanks to Top-ix and their Development Program. But still, don’t forget to donate us, we need your support!

After 2 months of hard work, Enlik and I (but mainly him) completed the split of the Sabayon Portage overlay. But what is it about?
It all started when Pacho Ramos kindly asked us to separate ebuilds that could be upstreamed (towards Gentoo) and ebuilds that only contained Sabayon business logic.
Since our overlay was quite fat, it really took us several weeks to accomplish the request… {omg here}

After the split, we ended up having: overlays/for-gentoo.git and overlays/sabayon.git git repos containing respectively the “sabayon” and “sabayon-distro” layman repositories.
So, layman -fa sabayon will now pull the for-gentoo.git overlay, which contains new cool stuff geared towards Gentoo users as well.
And, as said above, layman -fa sabayon-distro will give you the rest of our ebuild stuff.

Now it’s time to (slowly) “monetize” the split helping out upstream with patches and version bumps!

To install or not is the question I’ve been asking myself.  My laptop has windows 7 installed and works fine and I use it for business usage while doing photography as I can use it to trigger my camera and view images with Lightroom.  I really don’t need linux on it and as long as I have a USB stick, I can boot it up to linux anytime I want to.  I thought I would give a test and see what would happen if I just leave it run and drag it around with me to work and home with just a live USB.  I popped Sabayon Forensics amd64 XFCE on to the USB stick and I’m over 3 days now and it’s working flawlessly.  I’ve even used entropy to install some applications I wanted.  So the only advantage I would get if I installed it is the ability to save.  I’m not gonna be using my laptop and linux where I need to save tho.  I have a desktop for my main productive work and I’ve even been sshing in from the laptop to do some of that work.

An eight dollar USB drive and you can make a computer come to life.  The performance over a dvd drive is 100xs better.  The wonderful tool molecule, which is available in entropy, can help you make a custom Sabayon for your needs.  So if you are interested, check out the Sabayon wiki for a molecule howto.

I’m gonna continue to let this run an and see what happens.