Category Archives: News

Life, Gentoo & Sabayon

As always, long time no blog, so lets hope this one is good, eh?

I have become Gentoo developer. Which I was pretty happy about. This means of course that the Sabayon project now has two Gentoo developers in its ranks.

Lxnay as you may remember has been a Gentoo developer for a while and has been busily working on adding all the powerful Sabayon technologies to portage, such as Entropy and Molecule, he is also in the Gnome herd, so has been battling Gnome 3.2, which he loves, by the way.

I on the other hand have joined the KDE herd, so there is a nice symmetry between our responsibilities. I plan on fixing up various packages around portage and maintaining a few I use a lot and need some love, such as the Pigdin SIPE/OCS plugin.

A nice example of how this setup benefits both Sabayon and Gentoo users can been seen in Sabayon bug report #2733, where I bumped the “PlayOnLinux” package in portage, enabling both the Sabayon entropy maintainers and any Gentoo user to build the package.

I have been on an excellent trip to New York City, a fantastic place to visit and I highly recommend going if you get the chance, I also spotted this gem on the flight over.

In other Sabayon news, Sabayon 7 has been tagged, the development team are testing the final tagged release so expect it imminently.

I hope to get back into the habit of blogging over the coming months and as always please feel free to comment to ask questions etc.

You can also follow me on twitter, or add me on google+.

Looking for Derivatives

A quick call for anyone who has created a Sabayon derivative or spin that is publicly available.

I am currently adding a derivatives section on the new site and it looking a bit bare, so if you would like the possibility of some more hits for your Sabayon based distro, please contact me with details. Please include a project name, homepage and short description.

Thanks!

Official Linux(R) Licence

Registered TrademarkThe Sabayon Foundation has just had an official sub-license granted for our use of Linux(R) as part of “Sabayon Linux” & “SabayonLinux”, covering goods and services on every corner of the planet (including Antarctica!).

Linux is of course a trademark of Linus Torvalds and the Linux Foundation can provide everyone who uses the trademark as part of their product with a license to use it in countries where it is trademarked. This is a good deal for everyone involved as it means that Company X can no go using the Linux name for crappy products and services.

And so Linux(R) License No. 20110410-0332 is for Sabayon.

I feel that I should mention a video by Jon “maddog” Hall, of his keynote at CeBIT earlier this year called “The Hidden Costs of Closed Source Software”, the inital part of which originally raised to fact that we had not in fact registered our use of Linux! Its a very interesting video and Maddog puts his points across fairly without going to GNUCrazy…

The Hidden Costs of Closed Source Software – Jon “maddog” Hall

Sabayon in Linux Format #141

I have been waiting for this day for so long! Great to see it finally happen! Thank you to everyone who has donated and may our path to world domination continue.

Apologies for the crappy phone images, blame HTC.

Shame the logo was rendered wrong.

Life, New Sabayon Site Design & Sabayon 5.5 Teaser

So what have I been up to lately? Well, I have recently got a nice new job with a local ex-ISP turned “cloud services” provider so I’m looking forward to jumping into the new role which, I hope, will be far more interesting as it will unleash my passion for Linux in a commercial environment. I’ve been a bit less active on the Sabayon front because of the job hunting and such but should increase again soon.

One of the things I’ve been working on is the Sabayon website design, the plan is to provide the whole portal and services with a uniform clean look that is more accessible and easy to use. I’ve attached a screenshot of the homepage draft design, feedback as always is encouraged.

Sabayon Website Redesign Beta

I have moved bugs.sabayon.org to the Bugzilla.git repository but have not been able to work on the new styling for a while which is a shame however its high on my todo list.

I’ve also been improving some of my various other projects, for instance the IRC bot ParkerBeta on the #Sabayon IRC channels on Freenode, the facts database module recently got an update to enable to the deletion of particular numbered entries on entries with multiple output. The not so functional Entropy module is getting a major update to use another of my recently started projects a JSON API for entropy, its currently in the very early stages, but when finished should allow lots of cool stuff to built on top of it, think nice AJAX web interfaces etc.

So finally: Sabayon 5.5 may or may not be planned for around Christmas.

The Path to Sabayon 5.4

Recently I seem to have been neglecting my blog a bit, I will try to keep it more regularly updated from now on.

The next Sabayon Linux release will be 5.4 as usual it will have the usual skew of package updates and bug fixes. We are tracking the bugs earmarked for fixing before 5.4 using the Sabayon 5.4 Tracking Bug. This means that you can see which bugs will be fixed for 5.4 and the status of each issue individually; it also means you can report bugs and we can easily target those before each release. This is a new public approach for to nailing down issues before release and is due in part to structural changes within the Sabayon testers group.

Previously the Sabayon testers team (who are one of Sabayon’s most valuable assets) had a closed mailing list and IRC channel, as of this week both of these are being closed and all activity will be moved over to the existing public infrastructure of the Sabayon-dev mailing list and #Sabayon-dev IRC channel on freenode. The ‘opening up’ of the process was done to improve communication with the wider community, ideally it will  get some more testers involved in testing and encourage more widespread input on the varying aspects of the the distribution. If you want to get involved, just grab one of the Sabayon daily images and hop on the devel mailing list with any issues.

I have decided to pick my artwork duties back up for 5.4 (as no else has volunteered to do art!) which means I can also reveal some things regarding the theme for 5.4. Firstly there will be a new theme which shares a colour scheme with the current 5.x theme, hooray! Secondly, the Sabayon “hens foot” logo will be brought back as the official Sabayon logo! Woot! There will also be a brand new KDM theme and wider KDE will be getting some theming love too.

In conclusion then, there is a lot to look forward to in Sabayon Linux 5.4, stay tuned for more information.

Press Release: Sabayon Linux x86/x86-64 daily ISO images

After several weeks of testing and ironing, we are happy to announce the public availability of daily (or nightly if you prefer) Sabayon Linux (Standard and CoreCD editions) ISO images. The aim is to improve packages and general system functionality testing during releases lifecycle by providing always up-to-date installable LiveDVDs/LiveCDs.

Our stable releases are just “snapshots” of these ISO images, so you will be able to know (and report) about possible hardware, software issue before a new version is published.

Features of Sabayon DAILY ISO images:

  • Up-to-date packages (ISO images are built every night)
  • Featuring the new Anaconda Installer port
  • Speed improvements over 5.2 ISO images
  • Fully compliant with our rolling-distro philosophy, keep looking ahead

Minimum Requirements

See respective Press Releases. Got a PC, keyboard and monitor? That’s enough!

Warning, this is the bleeding edge of bleeding edge, do not use them on production systems.

ISO file names do not expose a timestamp directly, but RELEASE_DATE_DAILY does, as well as ISO boot menu and BUILD_INFO inside the ISO image filesystem.

Download sources

Our Mirrors Page:

  • NOTE 1: files are inside iso/daily directory
  • NOTE 2: these ISO images are moving targets, make sure to check them against respective .md5 files.

http://www.sabayon.org/download

(Seems this never made it to planet so posting it here for reference, very cool imo)

Sabayon – Nightly Builds, Installer & Recruitment

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve blogged, so I think its time I started doing it more regularly again. So what is going down in Sabayon HQ? Well there have been many interesting developments recently which I want to talk about.

Firstly we have the brand spanking new shiny Anaconda installer, this has been well publicised by wolfden and Lxnay and is really shaping up nicely, its about time the installer got an update and it is looking awesome, everyone has been testing (and breaking) the new installer and progress looks excellent. This is of course mainline Anaconda that is used in Fedora and RHEL et al and has inherited all the great features from it with some new sabayon specific stuff too, this version is more closely based on vanilla upstream git and as such we should inherit all the work that is being done upstream a lot faster.

Next up is nightly builds of sabayon, yes you read that correctly. The idea is that you will have one ISO on your hard disk which you will keep updated using rsync’s binary diff capabilities and the Sabayon rsync servers to only update the parts of the ISO that have changed, this is how we have been distributing ISOs to testers for a while now and is much quicker and easier than the old version using Xdelta. What has been done is that we have a scripted molecule install which creates a new ISO at 0200 UTC every night using the latest packages from the mainline repository, from these images the rysnc is updated and you can download the changes, simple but clever if you ask me.

Finally – recruitment. Getting people to work on an open source project is never easy, its not easy to find volunteers for anything in reality as time is such an expensive commodity. I have decided to step down from my position as artwork guy and as such Sabayon is looking for a replacement, if you have some design and theming skills, or even if you don’t why not get in contact with me and I’ll get you started.

You will need a good eye, ability to work in a team an interest in Sabayon and ability to use SVG, it would be preferred if you had some knowledge of bash scripts, ebuilds and linux theming, but we can train you if your designs are great. Once again, please do get in contact, either mail me, start a thread in the forums and show us your stuff or leave a comment even.

…and that’s all I can think of for now.

Press Release: Sabayon Linux x86/x86-64 5.2 GNOME and KDE

The best, refined blend of GNU/Linux, coming with bleeding edge edges is eventually here! Say hello to Sabayon Five-point-Twoh, available in both GNOME and KDE editions!
Dedicated to those who like cutting edge stability, out of the box experience, outstanding Desktop performance, clean and beauty. Sabayon 5.2 will catch you, anything that could have been compiled, has been compiled, anything cool that could have been implemented or updated, it’s there: you will find outstanding amount of new applications and features, like XBMC 9.11, KDE 4.4.1, GNOME 2.28, Linux Kernel 2.6.33, and so forth.
So, come on, go catch it, it’s half a DVD away from you!

Visual Tours:

Features of Sabayon 5.2:

  • Based on new GCC 4.4.1 and Glibc 2.10
  • Shipped with Desktop-optimized Linux kernel 2.6.33
  • Providing extra Server-optimized and OpenVZ-enabled kernels in repositories
  • Installable in 10 minutes
  • Faster boot time and lightweight default system
  • Ext4 filesystem as default
  • Encrypted filesystem support
  • Featuring X.Org 7.5 and up-to-date Open Source, NVIDIA, AMD video drivers
  • Containing GNOME 2.28 (with GNOME Shell!) and KDE 4.4.1
  • Outstanding 3D Desktop applications (Compiz, Compiz Fusion and KWin) working out of the box
  • Bringing Entropy Framework (Package Manager) 0.99.38.7
  • Shipped with OpenOffice 3.2 productivity suite, Multimedia applications
  • Transform Sabayon into an full-featured HTPC Operating System (Media Center) using XBMC
  • Shipped with World of Goo Demo – best 2D game ever!
  • Sexiest Skin ever! (Light blueeee!)
  • Try it out from Windows, just kick the DVD in and use Sabayon via QEMU virtualization!
  • Ready for Sabayon 6 (someday!)

Updates since Sabayon 5.2:

  • New Linux Kernel 2.6.33 with enhanced wireless and power management support
  • Switched to GRUB2, improved Mac support
  • Improved VirtualBox Input drivers support
  • KDE updated to 4.4.1 and now more integrated than ever (featuring new KNetworkManager)!
  • Entropy Framework updated to 0.99.38.7, featuring outstanding performance improvements, tons of bugfixes and features (see our Git repos). Working towards 1.0!
  • More than 2000 new updated packages available (since Sabayon 5.1)
  • Greatly improved boot time
  • Improved Pulseaudio/ALSA support
  • Reduced ISO images footprint by 100Mb
  • Improved NVIDIA legacy drivers support
  • Improved XBMC, Media Center installation profile support and reliability

Requirements

Minimum requirements:
- an i686-compatible Processor (Intel Pentium II/III, Celeron, AMD Athlon)
- 512Mb RAM
- 6 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
- 15 GB of free space
- A X.Org supported 3D GPU (Intel, AMD, NVIDIA) (esp. for XBMC)
- a DVD reader

Resources for Sabayon Linux 5.2 GNOME and KDE:

Kernel Configuration:
- Sabayon 5.2 x86 kernel config
- Sabayon 5.2 amd64 kernel config
Packages list:
- Sabayon Linux x86 5.2 KDE Packages
- Sabayon Linux x86-64 5.2 KDE Packages
- Sabayon Linux x86 5.2 GNOME Packages
- Sabayon Linux x86-64 5.2 GNOME Packages

Download sources

Our Mirrors Page:
- http://www.sabayon.org/download
Bittorrent:
- http://tracker.sabayon.org/