Lectori salutem

Sabayon 5.0 update

2009-09-18T07:29:00.000-07:00

Its been a little while since I posted on this blog but let me tell you in short whats going to happen very soon:

- Sabayon 5.0 Release Candidate 1 will be released for testing.

The Sabayon testing team went through 2 beta stages to get here so it should be fine for most people to check out. If the RC1 makes it through testing team it will be marked as 5.0.

- Chromium is here! No not only the chromium-bin version, but the chromium version build against our tree. (Entropy) and yes it works with flash!

- You can migrate to Sabayon branch 5 now using the following procedure:

Make sure you have latest entropy version on branch 4
equo hop 5
equo update
equo upgrade

Keep in mind that there is NO more support for KDE 3.x If your system has KDE 3.x installed don't expect it to work after you've migrated to branch 5.

- We've migrated to latest libxcb-1.4

- Sabayon 5 will be more bleeding edge then ever! And we are planning keeping things updated daily using a testing repository. On the next release (5.1) all packages from testing repository will flow into the mainline repository.

- Latest beta 9.10 ATI fglrx are in entropy

- Kernel 2.6.31

So expect all off this coming to you very soon.

Jumping into Branch 5

2009-07-13T23:16:00.000-07:00

At this point of writing it feels like the branch is fairly in shape enough. I've added KDE 4.3 RC2 from kde-testing overlay to work towards the final KDE 4.3 release.

As we speak a migration tool is being written to handle certain things that must be done after you hop into branch 5. If you are a little dare devil and want to jump into branch 5 ( equo hop 5 ) you need to keep in mind these steps.

Do I realise that I'm about to download 800 - 1000 packages and I have enough free disc space to survive that operation.
It's important, since its a binary tree, that you complete equo upgrade (or what we used to call equo world)
I'm not sure when the migration tools will be implemented but since we jumped to Python 2.6 you need to check eselect python list and see if its set to this.
You will most likely need to equo install gcc and run gcc-config and set it to the latest gcc version
You need to run binutils-config to manauly select a profile.
The lowest kernel is a 2.26.30 you need to check with eselect kernel if its set to it and maybe manualy add the entry in /boot/grub/grub.conf
Right now there is no new artwork available in branch 5 so it will kinda look the same.

If none of above stop you from trying the new branch, well its there for you.

Branch 5: A work in progress

2009-06-23T09:51:00.000-07:00

About 3 weeks ago i started work on branch 5 for Sabayon 5 and i must say that i made good progress! So i hear you ask, what it means a "branch" well let me try to explain how it all works.

Branches...chroots..snapshots?

The chroots:

As you might already know, Sabayon Linux is based on Gentoo Linux.
Now in Italy we have this huge computer that hosts basically 2 enormous Gentoo installs, we call these "chroots". It's 2 chroots because we support 2 architectures amd64 and x86. So as you might guessed, yes all packaging that goes into entropy is done twice. These 2 chroots form one branch.

How i do it? Well I simply login the Italian server and connect to one of the chroots. When I log in to a chroot ( yes its the chroot command, but we saved them in screen sessions to get access to them quickly ) I use all the commands any Gentoo user would. I operate my make.conf, package.use and package.mask files to have my enormous tree compiled to be best performing for a great amount of machines and people. Day to day i check for relevant packages that we want to have updated in e.g. Entropy. When i'm done emerging those updates and their depends i use tools written by Fabio Erculiani aka "Lxnay" to create packages. This is done fully automatically and there is nothing difficult about that really. So once its all packaged and i did my quality checks its all ready to get pushed out to the people as I say. From the server in Italy things get uploaded to the distribution server from where everything, again automatically, gets spread to servers world wide. Pretty cool huh?

Branches :

So we have these chroots I'm working on day 2 day and at a certain point there are some important updates that require allot of packages to be recompiled. Think of a new python version, new xorg version and some other lower-level stuff like the compiler itself.
At some point it just makes sense to stop doing the day 2 day updates, copy the whole thing and from the copy do the important updates and the heavy recompiling. This new copy would be the new branch. Does it mean that the previous branch is closed? Well basicly from my side it is, i only do updates on it when there are security risks involved, we are Linux and we want to keep people safe. The goal is to keep the old branch available to users for at least a year. This will give them the time to migrate to the new branch. (By either installing a new DVD release or use equo hop to jump into the new branch.) So yeah, its possible to keep on working on the same system and just hop into the new branch.

Snapshots:

When a new branch is created and the first disc is released there are already newer updates almost everyday. At some point it would be enough to trigger like 300 updates after a new install on a users pc. This can be even within 6 weeks or so. At some point we create a new snapshot which is basically as much as : Take Release 1, equo upgrade it to the latest available packages, put is all on a disc.

So yeah, we are a true rolling distribution!

Blogging from the Linux desktop

2009-05-27T12:30:00.001-07:00

Now that Gnome 2.26 is finally in Entropy i was looking at some stuff to highlight a bit.

Incase you missed it, Spritz got renamed to Sulfur this week. If you haven't allready installed it yet, check it out! The idea behind it was to by default offer a less complex interface for the comfort of lesser experienced people out there. You can simply switch to the older interface with all the options by selecting the "Advanced Mode" from the Sulfur top menu.

One of the recent added programs to portage is "Choqok" I nice micro-blogging application thats well designed in Qt4. It has inituative tabs and lets you, on Twitter, Re-Tweet Favorite and reply easily.

Another nice application for the more intense blogging work i've found got very recently added to Portage. Bilbo Blogger.

This program offers you a rich text editor to write your blog and depending on the API that the blogsite provides, it even lets you add images easily. Setting up the account is done by simply dumping in the link to your blog and your credentials.

Meanwhile i can tell you that we are on schedule for the next comming Sabayon Linux G 4.2 release. If you allready have Sabayon 4 and keep it up2date using Entropy, there will be no need to install it. All the artwork related to it is rolling in Entropy as we speak. So when you are Entropy world updated a 4.2 will be visable when you startup your machine.

Last but not least, I came across a nice video about why Linux sucks. Check it out because its all true! (ok most of it)

E17 now available in Entropy

2009-04-25T12:16:00.000-07:00

To get it installed do this:

as root in a terminal:
equo update

then

edit /etc/entropy/packages/package.unmask
add into this file:

dev-libs/eina
dev-libs/eet
x11-libs/evas
x11-libs/ecore
dev-libs/embryo
media-libs/edje
dev-libs/efreet
x11-libs/e_dbus
x11-wm/enlightenment

then

equo install dev-libs/eina dev-libs/eet x11-libs/evas x11-libs/ecore dev-libs/embryo media-libs/edje dev-libs/efreet x11-libs/e_dbus x11-wm/enlightenment

Now e17 is installed and you can enjoy it by selecting "enlightenment" from the sessions menu in the login screen.

additional tips:

Download themes here!

Goodluck Fabio and Welcome Daniel

2009-04-01T01:12:00.000-07:00

After some years of hard work Fabio Erculiani decided it was enough and he wants to move on.

The team regrets this ofcourse and we wish him all the good luck with his new job @Microsoft

Would this mean the end of Sabayon? No! ofcourse not.
We have Daniel Robbins and some gentoo-devs ready to come help the distro to make it even better.

A press update will follow shortly

Some additions to KDE4

2009-03-17T06:49:00.000-07:00

We are working on the next Sabayon 4.1 release and things are going well.

As you might know, this time we want to do things slightly different. Ironicly we always do things different. But this time we decided to work on 2 different DVD's based on the previous succesfull release of liteMCE.

The G disc:

This will be allot like the liteMCE disc which features gnome as its desktopmanger.

The G disc doesn't need much work. Since its mostly an updated packages/artwork version of liteMCE.

The K disc:

This would be the same thing as the G disc but with KDE 4.2.1 as its desktopmanager.

Now this one will take more time because we want to tackle some practical problems. We want to ship the K with the most pure KDE/Qt programs and we need to work out some of the artwork issues like GTK applications (e.g. firefox) that are looking ugly.

So i went looking and found a nice replacement for Gparted:

http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php/KDE+Partition+Manager?content=89595

This package is already available in entropy. Please note that its still marked as beta and on my system it took a while before it loaded up on my screen.

Another thing we wanted to add to the K disc is a nice little program that lets you edit the grub menu and even reinstall grub in case of an emergency.

The GRUB editor program is now in entropy.

http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php/KGRUBEditor?content=75442

Any further suggestions are welcome.

Entropy UGC

2009-02-17T13:18:00.000-08:00

Ever since we launched the new website and implemented UGC (User Generated Content) in entropy it looks like it never came clear what this is all about. Let me try to put some light in the dark here and explain about the purpose about it.

We wanted to combine web 2.0 functionality with our packagemanager.
A user should be able to login into spritz and rate a package and further more, add some media to it so other users can see this using either spritz or directly from the web.

So what lxnay did was translate the phpbb functions into our own python api that would make interaction between forum and entropy UGC possible.

You might not have noticed it yet, but if you double click on a package in spritz this will open a new dialog presenting some more details about this package. How its build and when and more details you might never need to know.

Simply click on + add document here to add your own picture / howto / comment / youtube video to share with other users.

The same thing is possible using the webinterface, just go to

http://packages.sabayonlinux.org

Easy as pie i'd say.
Just use your forum account to login and share with others!

Creating a backup for entropy.

2009-01-16T12:31:00.000-08:00

Entropy and its tools offer allot of things you might never guessed.

Lets take spritz and create a backup from our local client database. Its wise to make a backup of this client database every now and then because this holds all the information about your system installed packages.

Just hit "New Backup" and it will create a backup that we can use later in case of an emergency.

Running equo database backup will do the same thing.

I want to note that there are 2 databases that entropy uses.

The online database that holds entries about every package you can install. This is the database that gets updated when you run "equo update". If for whatever reason this database get damaged, or when you cannot seem to update it using equo update, you can simply overwrite it and download a fresh new one using equo update --force.

The client database that holds everything you have installed on your system. When this gets corrupted OR removed you are screwed unless you have a very recent backup made as i explained above.

Now if for whatever reason the client database is removed/corrupt and you didn't make any backup, there is one option that we can try to regenerate the client database.
Because we know from our online database what files belong to what package, we can scan the filesystem and poll the database and recreate our client database.

So if there is no way to get your things back togheter using a backup you can at the end of the line use our special escape: equo database resurrect

A sad day for the community

2008-11-04T11:25:00.000-08:00

Dear friends,

Today we've learned that our friend mr. Bunz died.
Our thoughts are with his family and friends.

The man with the balloons that always made us smile is no more.

http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/112-10212008-1608461.html%27

The road to Sabayon 4.0

2008-10-09T02:38:00.000-07:00

Our team is growing stronger and everybody is working hard to get things in shape. I think its like 2 months ago that we decided to write down an organisation structure in wich everybody invloved gets a place and its tasks.

We needed to make this step to get things done faster and work more efficient on the project.
A real important position in this all would be the desktop users voice. It was obvious to ask Kelly Schwartz (wolfden) to take this position (CCO - Chief Community Officer) and he accepted it.

Our CCO knows whats going on in the community, problems people run into and also things people would like in the distro or don't. Our CCO now has a direct voice under Fabio and this means our intentions are to really make this distro suit perfect for our community.

Besides the CCO allot of positions are taken and some new people hooked up to the project, wich is great, but we still need more people on our development team. So if you think you can offer help in means of Bash/Python scripting or can help on the ebuilds in our overlay please contact us.

While i'm allready working on the 4.0 branch you might know that an interim release is planned. Sabayon 3.5.1 will be released soon and will diff 400+ package updates since sabayon 3.5 released. Also some other patches are applied to it.

So about 4.0, what can you expect?

KDE 4.1.2
Gnome 2.24
latest xorg (hopefully the AMD/ATI driver will be ready for it soon)
and allot more.

We also changed the chost on the 32bits version. So it will be i686. This means that each package needed to be recompiled and thus gets a revision in Entropy. In short this means that by the time you want to upgrade to 4.0 using Entropy, each package will be updated. On the amd64 4.0 branch this will not be necessary.

CrossOver Chromium

2008-09-20T05:53:00.000-07:00

In addition to my previous post, my friend from Brasil pointed out that Codeweavers created a more elegant way to play with Google Chrome.

http://media.codeweavers.com/pub/crossover/chromium/install-cxchromium-0.9.0.sh

Enjoy!

Google chrome under Wine

2008-09-20T05:05:00.000-07:00

While it still is beta, like anything from Google, it is possible to run Google chrome on Sabayon.

We need to download the installer first:
http://gpdl.google.com/chrome/install/149.29/chrome_installer.ex e

Click to install it and notice that a desktop icon for Chrome is created. Now open up a terminal and edit this file.

nano Google\ Chrome.desktop

Edit the line so it looks like this:

Exec[$e]=env WINEPREFIX="/home/joost/.wine" wine "C:\\windows\\profiles\\joost\\Local Settings\\Application Data\\Google\\Chrome\\Application\\chrome.exe" --new-http --in-process-plugins

As you can see i've added --new-http --in-process-plugins to that line (outside the quotes).

Now fire op Chrome from your desktop icon.
I noticed that on KDE the top panel overlaps, so might wanna drag it away to the side.

Happy hacking!

Source: http://www.myscienceisbetter.info/2008/09/install-google-chrome-on-linux-using-wine.html

Where is KDE 4.1?

2008-08-17T12:09:00.000-07:00

Archlinux has it, Fedora has it, but where is KDE 4.1 on Sabayon Linux?

As you know Sabayon Linux depends on Gentoo portage. We use it as our backbone.
Portage is a robust package manager and everything in there is pre-tested by its maintainer.

Now portage has its categories with its own developers that create ebuilds and patches. So there are teams on several projects like gnome, xorg, java, etc etc.

Now from my understanding the KDE team has shrunk desperately lately because they reorganized the team. I won't go in detail about that, but the timing is a bit nasty sadly.

If you are curious about the progress being made, have a look here http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/kde.git;a=shortlog

Only thing i can say about the few people working on it, respect!

As soon KDE 4.1 is done and hits portage, Sabayon Linux will merge it in the 3.5 branch. So you will not have to wait for a next Sabayon version at all.

Another thing i wanted to share with you is NFS.
If you have NFS shares in your fstab and you want them to be mounted after boot, this somehow doesn't work on Sabayon. For some Reason the order, depend at boot time isn't right for this setup. A rather simple fix solves that though.

Edit your /etc/init.d/nfs and add sleep 10 to it. This makes it wait 10 seconds (so Networkmanager should be done with whatever its doing).

A dirty but effective fix.

snipet:

#!/sbin/runscript
# Copyright 1999-2007 Gentoo Foundation
# Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2
# $Header: /var/cvsroot/gentoo-x86/net-fs/nfs-utils/files/nfs.initd,v 1.12 2008/04/20 00:52:24 vapier Exp $

opts="reload"

# This variable is used for controlling whether or not to run exportfs -ua;
# see stop() for more information
restarting=no

# The binary locations
exportfs=/usr/sbin/exportfs
mountd=/usr/sbin/rpc.mountd
 nfsd=/usr/sbin/rpc.nfsd
smnotify=/usr/sbin/sm-notify

sleep 10

depend() {
local myneed=""
if [ -e /etc/exports ] ; then
if awk '!/^[[:space:]]*#/ && $2 ~ /sec=/ { exit 0 } END { exit 1 }' /etc/exports ; then
 myneed="${myneed} rpc.svcgssd"
fi
fi
type -t config 2>/dev/null 1>&2 && config /etc/exports
need portmap rpc.statd ${myneed}
use ypbind net dns rpc.rquotad rpc.idmapd rpc.svcgssd
after quota
}

.... etc etc....

Relaxing in Amsterdam

2008-07-12T15:15:00.000-07:00

After a bussy and confusing week i was glad this Amsterdam weekend trip was planned.

I had a quick meeting with Armin Wintasunn we had some coffee at the Spui. I admire the guy as he really creates art on the web. proof

Since i mostly meet new people on the internet and meet them in person later, it's always a funny thing when you sit and wait in a very crowded city waiting not nowing how someone you kinda know good enough looks like. So this meeting started funny when Armin phoned me standing just 1 meter next to me.

After quick decissions made about a project we might do, we seperated paths.

Spend the afternoon in the Vondel Park with my wife and kids. Its a nice place to chill out a bit. An oase of rest in a world city.

Oooh incase you missed it, yesterday the CD version of Sabayon linux got released. Under the codename "Pod" you'll have a nice small and elegant XFCE desktop. check it out

The road to 3.5 in a nutshell

2008-06-26T02:14:00.000-07:00

So where do i start?

Right after Sabayon Linux 3.4F mini released I completely focused on entropy.

I spend evenings testing equo, reporting back to Fabio. At some point I've reinstalled 3.4f like 12 times to test the upgrade procedure to Sabayon Linux 3.5 Loop 1 using only equo as a tool.
That was dirty but important work and now its all paying off!

Equo stabilised and we could start thinking about a GUI. Forking off Yum Extender Spritz was born. Meanwhile i worked on growing our repositories and slowly things started to grow and grow.

The project site was moved to a Level3 server in Amsterdam. Better server, greater bandwith, better deal. Actually it was cheaper so there wasn't much to think about.

We knew we needed to upscale our server capabilities and certainly needed the bandwith to be able to serve up our fresh repositories. We needed money.

I've contacted the people at nllgg.nl and they helped us out great. We quickly got a full mirror and nluug.nl thanks to them and applied for funds we needed at nlnet.nl. We were more then excited to hear we got chosen after some pre-sellection. With the funds we had allot less to worry about and really could focus on the plan Fabio created.

Meanwhile more and more people started hooking up to the project. Beta testers, translators and developers. Its great to see how it all comes togheter now.

Big thanks to everybody involved.