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!

ust committed the three ebuilds, the first is app-emulation/virtualbox-bin-3.0.0 and the second is app-emulation/vitualbox-modules-3.0.0 and finally app-emulation/virtualbox-guest-additions.

I may add the  OSE but I haven’t seen anyone using that recently, so it got left out this time.

This are in the overlay right now and support lots of cool stuff such as SMP (Multiple Virtual CPUs) to guest operating systems, plus guests are now able to access OpenGL 2.0 with hardware acceleration on supported hardware / drivers.

These will hopefully be in mainline entropy after the normal testing process, if you want then now you can simply emerge them.

Well during my usual perusal of Linux based sites one particular article took my eye, it was Linux Magazines Gentoo Optimizations Benchmarked.

It shows, in my opinion quite comprehensively, the advantage of a Gentoo base system with the latest kernel and I reccomend you check out the figures for yourself.

The article states that big gains can be made but is it worth the time? I say no, use entropy and get the best of both worlds!

Oh, you can find the entropy make.conf on any entropy mirror, if you want to take a look at the setup we use to build entropy packages.

P.S. Kororaa Linux was not the first LiveCD w/ 3D desktop effects, that would be Sabayon (ofcourse!), Chris knows this, we have emails to prove it also, so he should really change his little bio on that site.

Yesterday I pushed 3 new firefox versions into the sabayon overlay, “whats so great about these firefoxes?” I hear you ask, well there are a few things.

Firstly they branded correctly as “Sabayon” which means sites that pick up on what OS your using will show you as usiong Sabayon and not Gentoo. For example on my blog, when you post a comment you will get a little Sabayon logo by your comment! (had to patch the wordpress plugin, but it has been accepted upstream now)

Secondly they now use the Sabayon homepage as default, not gentoo.org, which means in theory we could remove the firefox profile from skel (and have one less thing to worry about). However skel also has some setting to make sure Flash and Java work OOTB so maybe not a good idea to that just yet, but we will see.

Finally, there are newer versions! woop! By default everyone will get an upgrade to firefox 3.5_rc2 (-r10). However there is still an older (stabler) version of 3.0.11(-r10) available for those who dont want to run a RC browser.

For the brave there is also a bleeding edge 9999(-r1) ebuild which pulls the very latest code directly from the mozilla repository. I use the 9999 build with 0 problems. Please report any issues you encounter with these new builds to the sabayon bugzilla.

4.2 is chugging along with testing nicley and the testers have just got a pre-alpha of the CoreCD version too.  As always keep an eye on planet for the latest updates

When KDE4 was first released I was shocked at the lack of conguration options themewise compared to 3.5 and its wealth of options, I had best note plasma however is a notable exception,  a triumph of customisation and SVG goodness!

Kwin has needed a decent engine for theming for a while, while its almost on par in terms of effects with compiz, it has always lacked the extensive customisation features provided by emerald and its various engines.

Then there is the default QT theme in KDE4.3 (oxygen). This has many fans and it is nice to see some technoloigical progress being made in terms of themeing. Personally im not a fan of the whole oxygen look as it wastes to many pixels and is mostly plain grey. In my opinion its only used by alot of people as they lack an alternative.

Currently I’m working on improving KDE4.3 experience in Sabayon, we have always shipped the excellent QtCurve Qt widgetset as a alternative to Oxygen as it very flexable, fast and can be made to look as you like, it also integrates perfectly with a GTK theme provided (no winNT style firefox!).

We have, for all the KDE4 releases, shipped with the default Kwin theme due to the lack of a suitable replacement. Yesterday however, while browsing through KDE-look.org looking for a new wallpaper for my machine, I noted the Aurorae Theme Engine. This engine is designed to KDE4.3+ and uses SVGs to decorate the windows. “Yay!” was my inital thought and I immedietly installed it from the provided ebuild ( a bumped version with some cleanup is on the sabayon overlay now).

Work is now in progress on a theme for 5.0 for keep an eye out for 50._beta3 artwork.

Im back! woot. After a week of holiday its good to get involved again with some Sabayon stuff. Holiday was nice got to see the Folks and have a bit of a computer detox! Im surprised I survived so long with no linuxiness to be honest.

So I come back and the branch 5 situation has changed a bit, (which 100+ testers/devel mailing list messages attest too) the 5.0 Beta1 iso has been pushed out to the testers and then lxnay decides its a good time for a holiday (good timing perhaps?). There seems to be the usual mixed issues with the first ISO spin, most issues now seem to be handled by improved entropy and migration scripts, branch 5 is shaping up nicely.

Ive switched to KDE4.3 from Gnome, So expect to see a much more polished and enhanced KDE (as you did with gnome when I switched to that) in the next release, things on KDE todo list are:

1. New QT theme (10% Done)
2. Getting sysinfo:// working (100% Done)
3. Getting sysinfo:// customised (15% Done)
4. Kicker Customisation (SL Logos etc)
5. Skel Cleanup
6. Sabayon XDG Menus Improve KDE Compat
7. Etc etc…

Feel free to add anything you want done to KDE in the comments and Ill incorporate them if appropriate.

Next post has 5.0_beta2 theme previews!

The sysinfo:/ kioslave (aka “My Computer”) in konqueror is one of my favourite KDE3.5 features, I saw that SuSE and Fedora had this working so decided to “port” it over to sabayon, so after a few hours of playing around (my term for Sabayon work lol) there is one more thing off my list, w00t.  Got that sorted yesterday, after a little patch to get it to compile and some custom artwork the result is shown at the bottom of this page:

Got a list of more stuff to-do however, =D.

If you are wondering about the network status, it picks it up from network manager, I use wicd, so thats not showing up. Its on the overlay now so if you want to try it, or if joost_op is awake you could use equo, this will be added to branch 5 only.

equo install kio-sysinfo

or

emerge  -av kio-sysinfo

On an unrelated note if anyone has an ATI (r600+) which they would like to donate, that would be great. I’m a Nvidia user personally but have been wanting to test ATi stuff.

Many fully fledges distros have drawn praise for bringing something new to the linux arena, while relying on the solid foundation of a mother distro, Mint, for example, is based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian. Sabayon is based on Gentoo; PCLinuxOS on Mandrivia so on and so forth.

There has been much comment in the community about these new distros taking the mother distros work, adding to it and pushing out releases without passing those additions back to the mother distro. In many ways  this is still happening, new distros come out each and every day which is a serious misallocation of reasources, I mean seriously how many different variants do you need? Devleopers will add a few packages change the wallpaper and claim it’s a new distro, which its not, sorry, Yes im talking to you Ubuntu scientology edition et al.

What I see is a worrying trend, that rather than becoming package maintainers for upstream packages developers often create small personal repos, helped in part by PPAs / overlay overuse, which means that effort gets divided and there are often duplicate packages, an older version in the main tree with its own maintainer and the newer version with more features and bug fixes in some obscure repository somewhere with a different maintainer.

There were claims earlier in its history that Ubuntu was doing similar, adding custom patches and only maintaining a small subset of the overall tree, while not offering those changes upstream. Nowadays the communication is better and the Debian developers seem relatively positive about Ubuntu.

Obviously we will never see the kinds of contributions that Redhat or Novell bring to linux and opensource from Ubuntu / Canocal as they have said they are not interested in doing it publically, but do the hundreds of small fixes as in their “papecuts” marketing gimmick make their way upstream?

A similar thing with Sabayon was claimed in the early days there seemed to be a bit of hostility from certain members of the Gentoo community about what Sabayon was doing.  This situation has improved dramatically in recent months, communication with upstream has improved, both reporting bugs and providing patches, Gentoo devs are often seen hanging around on sabayon channels and vice versa. Lxnay, the lead developer for Sabayon is now an official Gentoo developer. Joost the Entropy maintainer is working closely with both the KDE and Gnome herds to iron out issues with the latest release of both desktop environments.

The Sabayon team always desired to be working closer to upstream with the belief that together we are stronger, and that by having a more desktop and user focused Gentoo it would improve the Gentoo experience for a lot of users, and I think that extends to all of open source in general, if we all worked together in a harmonious way we could do anything, but its open source, so it will never happen, the status quo of its greatest strength and greatest weakness.

With Sabayon fever reaching boiling point I have some cool news to break to you all, which, as you have guessed from the title is that Sabayon 5.2 will ship with 2.6.33 Kernel with Con Kolivas 1 (ck1) 2.6.33 desktop performance patches (including BFS).

Sabayon has a reputation for pushing new desktop technologies into the forefront of Linux and this move will continue on that path, the announcement (commit) was made by our Great Leader(tm) Lxnay on the Sabayon development mailing list, as discussed previously Sabayon 5.2 is in closed beta testing and scheduled for release at the end of March.