If you are the devel mailing list you will have seen this already in the ongoing debate over “What is Sabayon” with regards to user group focus and the website. If you have any opinion on what Sabayon is, please leave it in the comments.

Originally, it was Ubuntu with out the “evil Mono(tm)”, now of course mainline Ubuntu has no mono either, so their USP was gone! So they changed their main idea.

The latest release is based on Kubuntu (which makes it a 4th generation distro) and aims to improve the KDE that is provided by Kubuntu by, this is what really got me, integrating more of Gnome into KDE.

Yes, really. Dolphin for instance is replaced by Nautilus, because Nautilus is more “Feature complete”.  I’m not sure how they came to that conclusion at all and especially within KDE Dolphin really shines, its integration with tech like Nepomuk and friends is a big plus.

In fact, which missing features of Dolphin? You mean the integrated terminal? No forced breadcrumb navigation? On wait, they are things Dolphin can do and Nautilus can’t. If anything, nautilus is getting worse, espesially with Gnome’s ongoing war against features that could confuse anyone with less mental power than a domesticated turkey.

(Domesticated Turkey fact: Young Turkeys don’t know how to eat. Turkey farmers make use of the chick’s natural attraction to bright colours: marbles or strips of foil are placed into their food, or their food is sprayed with green food colouring. In pecking at the colours, the turkeys learn to eat. )

One idea on their suggestions forum was to ship Windows apps pre-installed, uTorrent in fact. Native applications aren’t feature complete either?.

I suppose this is the strength of Linux – if you are looking for a Linux flavour for any particular purpose there will be one available -  even if what you want is a KDE/Gnome/Windows cross-breed Mongrel.

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.

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)

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.

Visual Tours:

• Take a Tour – Booting (GNOME)
• Take a Tour – Installer (GNOME)
• Take a Tour – Booting (KDE)
• Take a Tour – Installer (KDE)

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/

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!

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.

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.

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