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The Path to Sabayon 5.4

v00d00 — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 14:53:33 +0000

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

v00d00 — Tue, 11 May 2010 12:38:16 +0000

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

v00d00 — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 09:47:01 +0000

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

v00d00 — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 13:47:35 +0000

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/

Sabayon 5.2 Artwork Alpha/Draft 1

v00d00 — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 00:16:57 +0000

Even though 5.1 isn’t out yet (with many goodies I may add), work on the 5.2 artwork has started, plan for Sabayon 5.2 currently is a polished and reworked 5.0 style design.

As always comments are welcome.

Click the Image to enlarge to full size!

Pulseaudio and Kmix 4.4 in Sabayon 5

v00d00 — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 22:33:39 +0000

Recently there have been a number of issues reported in the forums and other places of people having issues with pulseaudio and KMix after updating to KDE 4.4.0. I am glad to announce that most of those issues should now be resolved with the latest round of updates being pushed out by hard-working entropy maintainer Joost! Woot!

I identified the root of most of the problems which seemed to be that we were shipping a quite broken pulseaudio configuration based on hard-wiring an ALSA module but also using the out dated HAL detection module, this has now been corrected to using the shiny new udev detection module by default. Other improvements to the new setup are up mixing by default to 5.1 and LFE remixing.

I have also bumped the pulseaudio patch for KMix so that is working nicely also, with multiple stream control working, global hotkey support fixed and should fix most pulse + kde issues.

As usual a “equo update && equo upgrade –ask” will grab you the latest updates. If you have any issues please please please report a bug with logs on the Bugzilla.