How things are going
Sabayon
Well, this morning I was thinking that I need to blog a little bit more, so here I am. Things are going well on the Sabayon side, we released a nearly perfect miniEdition last week and that’s a good thing from the QA side.
Talking about future releases:
- We are going to have a Professional Edition (yeah Business Edition changed its name) with the new artwork soon.
- We are going to have a new Loop release cycle (3.5 Loop 1) in less than one month with a huge amount of features (Entropy Alpha-stage included)
- We are going to public the new artwork stuff and rework the whole Sabayon theme that will show up in the upcoming releases listed above
Entropy/Equo
Even if I prefer coding rather than blogging about Entropy these days (eheh, let me keep this kind of secrecy for now), I can’t hide the fact that today has been a great day for the whole project. I successfully upgraded a 3.4F installation to the current available binary packages using Equo (that contain X.Org 7.3 for example…). A lot of code is still missing (like etc-update alike function, env-update, post/pre install scripts and so on), but things are moving fast!
Gentoo relationship
Some of you hide behind their stupidity thinking of me like a robber. Well, it’s not that and those guys don’t really have any clue. Firstly, I’d say: “Welcome to the Open Source world”. What I’m doing is building a mutual relationship among our project and some really kind Gentoo developers. I can’t hide the fact that drobbins always lays around #sabayon on irc.freenode.org and with him, you could see some pro-Sabayon Gentoo developers. It’s really nice to see that. I gave a lot to Gentoo, just think about the fact that even a newbie can install and use our distribution, this gives to Gentoo three main advantages:
- Users are going to use the Gentoo toolchain (portage, ebuilds and so on…)
- Users can really start to understand how an Operating System works under the hood, thanks to Gentoo scalability
- Users can use bleeding edge software and rethink their view on Gentoo
Yeah, because Sabayon is just how Gentoo should be for me: user friendly and at the same time powerful. So if you hear someone saying that Sabayon is not Gentoo, try to ask him why Sabayon is built with catalyst, uses portage (at the moment) and has a /var/db/pkg tree. What’s the difference between Gentoo and Sabayon? The answer is up to you.
More about Gentoo in the next days 
Great job guys ! can’t wait for a full entropy release and new smoother graphics so I won’t have to replace the current rough ones on install
i am glad the relationship with gentoo is smooth. i remember the long debates a long time ago about whether sabayon was still gentoo and how the whole relationship goes. it alwasy brings happy tears to my eyes when i see opensource distros putting aside their differences and focusing on their similarities and helping eachother. no matter how good sabayon gets we should stay good to our gentoo roots. i give them a lot of respect.
in a response to “how things are going” i would say on track.
Why Sabayon isn’t Gentoo
I think AllenJB explained very well why Sabayon isn’t Gentoo:
Sabayon is considered ‘close’ to Gentoo, but not necessarily ‘very close’ (atleast in my view). The reason for this is because Sabayon uses its own versions of some pretty major packages (browsing through their overlay, I see packages like grub, xorg-x11 and xorg-server to name just a few).
The problem is not that we (the Gentoo community) don’t want to provide official support, it’s that we can’t (beyond a certain point). Sabayon provides its own version of many packages and these seem to (sometimes) lag behind the official Gentoo tree. A case in example: The other day someone came into #gentoo complaining that nvidia-drivers wouldn’t install with glibc-2.6. Glibc-2.6 no longer includes the nptl and nptl-only USE flags, but the Sabayon package was still looking for them. There’s nothing the Gentoo developers can do about this – it would require commit access to Sabayon’s overlay. There’s nothing much most users can do about this – The only suggestion I could make was “ask in #sabayon or use the package from the official tree”.
Read the rest of this entry here »
http://www.theopensourceactivist.com/index.php/2007/08/24/why-sabayon-isnt-gentoo/#more-57
I just wanted to drop a thank you to you guys! I work in a networking department. 98% of our operating systems are windows servers. I have been wanting to get away from Windows for a long time. I am very new to Linux so trying to find and then get working compatible software for network admin and windows server compatibility has been very difficult. I have always wanted to try Gentoo but never had the time or patience to set up my work laptop. Your distro is amazing, does everything I needed and more. And never skipped a beat so far (only been using it for 2 days). It even recognizes and functions with all my hardware. Once again thank you!!!