Planet Sabayon Linux

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!

Now with any major new release of GNOME you are going to get alot of “omg totally awesome new stuff in gnome!” posts. When there are blogs out there with names like “omgubuntu” you have to expect this.

Gnome 3.0 at its core seems to be gnome shell bolted onto a standard gnome 2.2x, with the primary purpose it seems of hyping gnome using a bigger version number. Maybe its because KDE is now soild and gnome think they need something closer to KDE’s Plasma?

However, I will watch with interest at what happens in regards to gnome shell, Its nice to see that if needed Gnome can do something new. Great. The real question is do you want it to do something new?

For me its a No, i don’t. Gnome is generally preferred by businesses building a working desktop out of Linux, why? Because its solid, predictable, a tried a tested desktop, why mess with it….that’s KDEs job!

That’s why it wont be included in ubuntu until late 2010 I suppose. Looking like Empathy all over again.

And breaking Compiz compatibility is not cricket. Its only really ever worked properly on Gnome, I’ve moved on to Kwin now but that is beside the point.

In other news, I’m very happy that you have all voted “HELL YEAH” to keeping libdvdcss for many of the reasons I originally gave to keep it, I have 0 clue why Fabio wanted it removed anyway.

It does mean however that we cant be included on cover disks of magazines, which is a shame, would love to see Sabayon on the cover of Linux Format, but playing DVDs out of the box is always a winner with me!

Bookmark It

Now sometimes you find a bit of Linux goodness that makes your geeky bits tingle, I found one recently, its called SSHFS, and its part of the awesome fuse framework. As you may have guessed it allows you to mount a file system through a SSH connection, this means it can be read from and saved to as any other part of your local file-system!

This leads to some cool possibilities, mounting a remote server over a secure connection for easy file uploads and downloads, the ability to run local scripts on remote files (WIN) and more.

Its ultra easy to use:

emerge -av1 sys-fs/sshfs-fuse

or

equo install sshfs-fuse

then

sshfs username@server:/path/to/mountpoint

I have it set up to run when I login and I use RSA key based auth so no passwords for ultraconvience at the price of a little bit of security.

Just thought I’d spread the word a bit.

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!

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.

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 hardworking 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 upmixing 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.

If you have used entropy recently you will have noticed that all the mirrors are out of sync, we are aware of this issue.  Our primary mirror, garr.it experienced a hardware failure and so its mirror sites have been down. This has had a knock on effect on all the other mirrors, as they sync off the primary garr.it.

Garr are in the process of replacing the hardware and are looking to be back up soon, please bear with us until everything is back up and running.

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!

Press Release: Sabayon Linux x86/x86-64 5.1 GNOME and KDE

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 5.1

• Based on new GCC 4.4.1 and Glibc 2.10
• Shipped with Desktop-optimized Linux kernel 2.6.31 (ready for 2.6.32)
• Providing extra Server-optimized and OpenVZ-enabled kernels in repositories
• Installer now available in multiple languages
• Complete Ext4 filesystem support (used by default)
• Complete Encrypted filesystems support (via dmcrypt, available in the Installer)
• Featuring X.Org 7.5 and up-to-date FLOSS, NVIDIA, AMD video drivers
• Containing GNOME 2.28 (with GNOME Shell!) and KDE 4.3.4
• Outstanding 3D Desktop applications (Compiz, Compiz Fusion and KWin) working out of the box
• Bringing Entropy Framework (Package Manager) 0.99.19.1
• Shipped with OpenOffice 3.1 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! (Ian Whyman rocks)
• 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.o:

• KDE updated to 4.3.4 and now more integrated than ever!
• GNOME update to 2.28 and the outstanding new Desktop concept brought by GNOME Shell (available on DVD)
• Added the ability to try Sabayon under Windows via QEMU
• No more passwords to remember on Live system, just hit the Enter key
• Improved HDTV screens detection
• Entropy Framework updated to 0.99.19.1, featuring outstanding performance, tons of bugfixes and features (see our Git repos)
• More than 4000 new updated packages available
• Slightly improved Live boot speed
• Thanks to our Community, more than 120 new bugs were closed (see: Bugzilla) during this release cycle

Requirements

- an i686-compatible Processor (Intel Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Celeron, AMD K6-2, Athlon)
- 512Mb RAM
- 9 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
- 20 GB of free space
- A X.Org supported 3D GPU (Intel, AMD, NVIDIA) (esp. for XBMC)
- a DVD reader

Resources for Sabayon Linux 5.1 GNOME and KDE:

Kernel Configuration:
- Sabayon 5.1 x86 kernel config
- Sabayon 5.1 amd64 kernel config
Packages list:
- Sabayon Linux x86 5.1 KDE Packages
- Sabayon Linux x86-64 5.1 KDE Packages
- Sabayon Linux x86 5.1 GNOME Packages
- Sabayon Linux x86-64 5.1 GNOME Packages

Download sources

Our Mirrors Page:
- http://www.sabayon.org/download
Bittorrent:
- Sabayon Linux x86 5.1 KDE Torrent Download
- Sabayon Linux x86-64 5.1 KDE Torrent Download
- Sabayon Linux x86 5.1 GNOME Torrent Download
- Sabayon Linux x86-64 5.1 GNOME Torrent Download