Planet Sabayon Linux

Sabayon Linux 5.3 “Extra Spins” releases

Our crew, is happy to announce the immediate availability of XFCE, LXDE and SpinBase/OpenVZ Sabayon 5.3 “Spins” built on top of Sabayon “SpinBase” ISO images.
Under the “Extra Spins” umbrella, the Sabayon developers are going to experiment new Stable Releases with different package compositions.
Consider these “Extra Spins” an appetizer of what you will get in the upcoming months: more “Spins” are planned and more external contributions will be accepted.
Just like the other regular Sabayon releases, these “Extra Spins” are also daily built by our Build Servers and available in our mirrors inside the “iso/daily” directory.

Features of Sabayon 5.3 XFCE Spin:
• Bootable Image suitable for a CD or USB thumb drive (<700Mb)
• Linux 2.6.34 Desktop kernel w/Tuxonice and AUFS support
• XFCE 4.6.2 Desktop Environment
• NetworkManager 0.8 as default networking tool
• Out of the box NTFS support via NTFS-3G
• Mozilla Firefox 3.6.6
• Basic VirtualBox Guest integration
• Very fast installation via our Live Anaconda Installer (which gained stability improvements and several new minor features)
• Very minimal setup to fit into a CD, no fancy features and drivers. Designed for low-end computers.
• Package list: amd64
• Package list: x86

Features of Sabayon 5.3 LXDE Spin:
• Bootable Image suitable for a CD or USB thumb drive (<700Mb)
• Linux 2.6.34 Desktop kernel w/Tuxonice and AUFS support
• LXDE 0.5.0 Desktop Environment
• NetworkManager 0.8 as default networking tool
• Out of the box NTFS support via NTFS-3G
• Mozilla Firefox 3.6.6
• Basic VirtualBox Guest integration
• Very fast installation via our Live Anaconda Installer (which gained stability improvements and several new minor features)
• Very minimal setup to fit into a CD, no fancy features and drivers. Designed for low-end computers (and Windows-addicted users).
• Package list: amd64
• Package list: x86

Features of Sabayon 5.3 SpinBase/OpenVZ templates:
• To be used with OpenVZ servers (or Sabayon OpenVZ installations with sys-kernel/linux-openvz kernel)
• Very small footprint, yet providing a full feature OpenVZ guest Virtual Machine
• OpenVZ template installation howto available at planet.sabayon.org
• Package list: amd64
• Package list: x86

Download sources
Our Mirrors Page:
Just choose a link from the list and get to the “iso” directory
- http://www.sabayon.org/download
Bittorrent:
- http://tracker.sabayon.org

MD5 hashes of released files
71923122a703af647cf9128356edf103 Sabayon_Linux_5.3_amd64_LXDE.iso
dba2212e09764186ab56c74fdeb70922 Sabayon_Linux_5.3_x86_LXDE.iso
66c54177b3c26226689b571bb6eb9aa2 Sabayon_Linux_5.3_amd64_XFCE.iso
ec605701b7cbd24c07c82d956377be3e Sabayon_Linux_5.3_x86_XFCE.iso
ee2b3e08ab98e99713df9fa0c2f0fad3 Sabayon_Linux_SpinBase_5.3_amd64_openvz.tar.gz
aec80516bf2992d70960e337842eb8ec Sabayon_Linux_SpinBase_5.3_x86_openvz.tar.gz

A quick little guide on helping and getting involved with the future releases of Sabayon.  I know and see people asking what they can do to be more involved in Sabayon.  If you have some experience, time and capabilities, you can help test the weekly iso images or add the entropy limbo repository and test packages.  I wouldn’t recommend this for or on your production system.  You can and will run into broken stuff, but that is the fun in testing!  I like to use rsync as it saves on bandwidth of having to re-download the entire ISO.  With rsync you only download the changes.  So how does one do this you may ask.  It’s pretty easy, find a mirror on our download page that supports rsync.

Let’s for example use Italy – Garr mirror.  You will notice rsync://na.mirror.garr.it/sabayonlinux [1000Mbit/sec].

This is what you are looking for.  I myself have created in my home directory two directory structures /home/wolfden/isos/x86 and /home/wolfden/isos/64.  You have the option to rsync the entire directory which will grab all the iso images from the server.  I do not want to do that.  I only want the 64 bit ones as that is all I use.  So I rsync the Gnome and KDE editions of the x86_64 isos.  You will have to decide what you want to do.  Either do all or pick the one(s) you want.

Now I just need to run a simple command via terminal:

rsync –progress -av rsync://na.mirror.garr.it/sabayonlinux/Sabayon_Linux_DAILY_amd64_G.iso /home/wolfden/isos/64  (it’s a double dash in front of progress)

That will go out and fetch the iso file and place it into the directory.  I always grab the md5 file also and check the iso image.  Just like this:

rsync –progress -av rsync://na.mirror.garr.it/sabayonlinux/Sabayon_Linux_DAILY_amd64_G.md5 /home/wolfden/isos/64

than to verify

md5sum -c Sabayon_Linux_DAILY_amd64_G.iso

Now that you have the file, in the future when you run the above commands, it will update your iso and md5 by downloading only the changes instead of the entire iso file again.  You can of course download your first iso(s) off the ftp side of the server and move it to the correct directory and than run the rsync.  As long as the iso and path all point correctly it will update.

If you want to download all the isos, you can simple do something like:

rsync –progress -av rsync://na.mirror.garr.it/sabayonlinux/ /home/wolfden/isos

That will grab everything in the directory.  To get a directory listing:

rsync –list-only rsync://na.mirror.garr.it/sabayonlinux/

I like to use unetbootin and a flash drive for testing iso.  Save a blank cd/dvd-r and use a flash drive if you can.

Maybe you don’t want to test iso(s) and just want to test packages.  We have the entropy limbo repository that is the testing ground for packages before they get moved into the main line repository. One of the entropy team members will give a shout out here and there for specific testing of limbo packages even.  You can enable the limbo repository through sulfur or by editing the /etc/entropy/repositories.conf, please see our wiki for that.  Also make sure you are on the Sabayon Dev Mailing List to stay in touch with announcements and changes for testing.  Getting on the Dev ML should be your first step.

So now you are testing and find an issue or bug and need to report it.  You can use the Sabayon Dev ML, Sabayon Bugzilla or discuss testing in the special forum section devoted to just testing. When reporting, try to keep in mind a few important things that are needed:

• Which Sabayon Linux are you running – x86, x86_64, gnome, kde, core ?
• How to reproduce the issue? Give us the steps on what you did to get the issue(s) so we can try and reproduce it.
• Any and All Log files that pertain to the issue.
• Hardware List

The more information you submit, the easier it is for us and there is no cat and mouse chasing to get the required information.  Stating that the latest entropy limbo update crashed your desktop isn’t what we want to see.  Reports like that are usually deleted as they are useless.  So try and remember that the more information you can give, the better.  Someone will usually try and recreate the issue to confirm or deny the issue.  Feel free to confirm or deny the issue(s) as they are posted.

Being a tester is usually for experienced users and you usually don’t want to run it as your main operating system.  Some ask that they don’t have enough hard drive space to test and want to know if they can use Virtual Box.  Yes you can.  We need all aspects tested.  This includes things like virtualization, running it in live mode, and doing actual installs.  New users are gonna get their first impression from the Live mode, so we need that working flawlessly.  I like to use unetbootin for this.  Just let us know how you are running it, again, the more information you can provide, the better.  Test anyway you can and help make a stronger Sabayon and be apart of that.

Thanks to all that do already and will be in the future.

I can’t think of a better way to learn something new by playing. Since the “spin era” has begun with Sabayon Linux by using molecule, it’s something new to learn. Joost has posted a quick run down of how to do a basic spin.   I’ve been messing around with this molecule thing and have found that adding and subtracting packages is simple enough to do.  I do find that specific customizations of the user and root accounts a bit more complicated.  I’m still trying to figure that one out yet.  Scripting isn’t my strong point at all.  I understand what it needs to do, but assembling a script of commands and paths is like writing hieroglyphics.  I’m not sure where the script should be placed at in my spec file nor when the script should be invoked.

I didn’t have much interest in doing a spin till I realized that a couple of things in my own personal life stuck out to me.  The biggest thing was my constantly working and fixing on people’s windows machines that are constantly plagued with viruses and malware.   The idea than came up to make a spin specific to fixing and repairing windows machines.  I already knew that Sabayon boots up and works on many machines with no problems, which makes it great for such a job of booting windows machines that don’t.  I made my first spin and that same week I had 3 machines come in with problems.  I tossed in my spin, did the fixes, and got the machines back to a sane state again.  It’s very effective and saves me time.  I now carry it around on a usb stick and it’s with me at all times.  I learned a lot in the process and now with the structure in place, it’s easy for me to update my original spin with latest entropy.

I was talking with our local Chief of Police who is also on the task force for Child Pornography and discovered that at the last training class they were using old Knoppix disks to access a suspected computer.  I was surprised to see how limited they were and decided to take my spin a bit further and add some more stuff.  This is when my spin turned into a Sabayon Forensics spin.  I collected a list of packages that would be most useful and fairly easily for any law enforcement official to use.  Keep in mind that it’s for using at the local level to determine if a suspected computer needs to go into the crime lab.  It has the abilities to boot, fix, crack, search, upload, and transfer files easily on any computer.  I am using the gnome x86 for my base and plan on doing an x86 KDE one also.  My last issue to figure out is how to switch out the default background of the desktop.  I want to leave all the other artwork in place, just switch out the desktop background.   Once I figure this out, I plan to present this and maybe Sabayon can become a part of fighting crime.  If not adopted at the state level, it still will be used at the local level. This is my goal upon boot up:

One last thing before I sign off.  Last week we lost one of our staff members in an accident. He was laid  to rest on July 3rd and will be missed.  He is still in our thoughts and prayers to family and friends.  One of our staff members was able to attend the funeral and we sent flowers from the Sabayon crew.

Incase you fell asleep, Sabayon 5.3 was release last week.  My internet died for a while so I didn’t get much testing in on the final leg.  I’ve also been busy playin with molecule for my own adventure.  Enjoy!

The best, refined blend of GNU/Linux, coming with bleeding edge edges is eventually here! Say hello to Sabayon Five-point-Threeh, 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 5.3 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, KDE 4.4, GNOME 2.28, Linux Kernel 2.6.34, and so forth.
So, come on, go catch it, it’s half a DVD away from you!

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 5.3:
• Based on new GCC 4.4 and Glibc 2.10
• Shipped with Desktop-optimized Linux kernel 2.6.34
• Providing extra Server-optimized and OpenVZ-enabled kernels in repositories
• Installable in 10 minutes
• Fast boot time and lightweight default system
• Ext4 filesystem as default
• Official Btrfs filesystem support
• Encrypted filesystem support
• Featuring X.Org 7.5 and up-to-date, NVIDIA, AMD video drivers
• Containing GNOME 2.28 (with GNOME Shell!) and KDE 4.4.3
• Outstanding 3D Desktop applications (Compiz, Compiz Fusion and KWin) working out of the box
• Bringing Entropy Framework (Package Manager) 0.99.46.9
• 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 2.6.34 with enhanced wireless and power management support
• New Installer! Based on Fedora14 Anaconda, with improved LVM, RAID, Encryption, Filesystem support
• Optional language-pack download via Installer
• Improved GRUB2 support
• Improved VirtualBox input/video drivers support (based on 3.2.x branch)
• KDE updated to 4.4.3
• GNOME ready for 2.30 (will be available via updates)
• Entropy Framework (our binary package manager) updated to 0.99.46.9, featuring stability and performance improvements (especially in Sulfur)
• Providing PackageKit library and CLI support (version 0.6.5, kpackagekit and gnome-packagekit available in our repositories)
• More than 1000 new updated packages available (since Sabayon 5.2)
• Reduced ISO images footprint by 150Mb
• Improved XBMC, Media Center installation profile support and reliability (fixing several segfaults)
• Improved keyboard mappings autoconfiguration
• Password for root account is blank, so just hit enter when asks for root password

Requirements
Minimum requirements:
- an i686-compatible Processor (Intel Pentium II/III, Celeron, AMD Athlon)
- 512Mb RAM (GNOME) – 768Mb RAM (KDE)
- 8 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)

Resources for Sabayon Linux 5.3 GNOME and KDE:
Kernel Configuration:
- Sabayon 5.3 x86 kernel config
- Sabayon 5.3 amd64 kernel config
Packages list:
- Sabayon Linux x86 5.3 KDE Packages
- Sabayon Linux x86-64 5.3 KDE Packages
- Sabayon Linux x86 5.3 GNOME Packages
- Sabayon Linux x86-64 5.3 GNOME Packages

Download sources
Our Mirrors Page:
- http://www.sabayon.org/download
Bittorrent:
- http://tracker.sabayon.org/

Thanks everybody for having made this possible!

It must be about time for an update, tough to blog when summer is here.  5.3 is in the works and is at a RC2 status.  Some of the changes include bug fixes of course, btrfs support, mono removed from grub and installer fixes.  Keep in mind that btrfs is very young in development and should not be used in a stable environment.  I did try it out in a virtual box setting and it seemed to work good for the little bit of time I worked with it.  Mitch follows the progress of it and has been a good source for information.  It sounds like in kernel 2.6.36 things will even be better for btrfs.  I’ll have to try and keep an eye on it myself, seems promising.

We do have on the public mirrors a weekly build that anyone can download and test.  We do have a special forum section setup for discussion, reporting, etc.  You can also use our dev-ML to report stuff.  You can also use our bugzilla, just make the proper selection when reporting.  When reporting, please give as much information as you can, including any and all logs, version and how to reproduce.  If we don’t get enough information we have to dismiss the report, which is frustrating to the devs and to the users.  If you are interested in helping the community and devs, this is a great opportunity to test and report.  We started out with daily isos for testing, but it consumes a lot to do that, so we decided to go weekly.  It sounds like every Sunday at 5AM, (GMT+1, currently UTC+0200) a new iso will be available.  If things change, we will let yas know.  I do hope to see more users testing these isos.

Seeing people having problems with boot splash disappearing after updates.  Fabio reports it’s an upstream bug and simply need to do”

equo update && equo install lvm2 && reboot
<after reboot>
equo install linux-sabayon && reboot

I hope that fixes that issue.  As far as seeing a red, green, deformed image on boot, we are still looking at that as it only seems to effect some.  I have not seen this problem on my machine.  Joost has it happening on his machine tho.  Nvidia vs. ATI, corrupt image or simply aliens running amok.  I don’t know, but sooner or later it will present itself.

Core-cd ran into a problem when anaconda dropped support with the text installer.  Some of the solutions we are tinkering with is a light weight wm like flux to boot into and run the gui installer or try to patch it so it can work like it use to.  I haven’t had time to try out a weekly core-cd test iso lately, but it sounds like flux is what we are using on it right now.  As far as I know and assume, it doesn’t actually install flux when the install is done, but I could be totally wrong on that.   We will have to see what happens with this little adventure.

A few days ago there was a bump in virtual box and some seem to be having issues running it.  I can not reproduce the issue myself.  I’ve been suggesting equo install virtualbox-modules virtualbox-bin && reboot and it works for some.  If that don’t work than I am wondering what kernel you are using.  Remember kernel upgrades are not automatically pulled, you have to tell equo to install the latest kernel.  You should be able to do this simply with equo update && equo install linux-sabayon && equo upgrade.  The last part is important to pull the matching modules/drivers or if you know which modules/drivers you have, you can install just them.  If you don’t reinstall the drivers/modules after a kernel update, you will have a bad experience upon reboot. The latest kernel in entropy is 2.6.33 and 2.6.34 is being worked on.

A quick note about entropy.  It’s important to always make sure you have the latest entropy.  When you see the message that there is a new entropy version and it’s important to install that first, it’s not kidding.  You can solve a lot of issues by making sure you always have the latest entropy.  If you want, you can simply remember to do equo update && equo install entropy equo sulfur && equo upgrade once a day. You can’t go wrong and than you will always have the latest entropy before doing updates.  If you find entropy a bit aggressive on packages being pulled, try the –relaxed option, for example:  equo install foo –relaxed  That should pull lesser packages and if you are still not happy, try –nodeps like equo install foo –nodeps.  Note that  – is two hypens, sometimes on wordpress the hypens look like one.  Hopefully that will help some out.

Well if ya haven’t heard by now that Fabio has been working/slaving away on a new installer I would have to ask where ya been?  Naw, seriously tho, we discussed at the first of the year about redoing  the current installer to provide a better installer.  I grabbed the beta version yesterday and thought I would give yas a peek at it.

So far so good!  I hope people will find the installer better and have lesser issues.  I myself never had problems with the old installer, but thanks to Fabio for making something even better.  Feel free to throw a few donation dollars his way while he is in-between jobs and still improving on your favorite distro.  He really is working hard for everyone and deserves to be shown some appreciation.

The Sabayon Linux CoreCD edition is a minimalistic release designed to provide a foundation for building a customized installation tailored to the users specific needs.

It’s smaller footprint allows for installation from a CD, and the CoreCD is also great for USB installations.

Features of Sabayon 5.2 CoreCD:
• Bootable Image suitable for a CD or USB thumb drive (~350MB-400MB)
• Text-Based installer
• Basic default networking
• Entropy and Portage ready (giving access to thousands of installable packages)
• 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
• Quick installation

Minimum Requirements:
- an i686-compatible Processor (Intel Pentium II/III, Celeron, AMD Athlon)
- 512Mb RAM
- 2 GB of free space

The CoreCD release is targeted to advanced users who want to take full control of the features and packages installed on their system. Sabayon’s Entropy package manager can be utilized as soon as the CoreCD release is installed to quickly build out the installation based on the users exact requirements. The CoreCD also has the capability to install packages using the Portage package management system.

For more information, please see the “Visual Tour: CoreCD” on Sabayon’s Wiki.

Networking Notes: Advanced user skills may be necessary to implement networking on the CoreCD. The CoreCD can provide simple dhcp networking over wired networks by default. Most advanced networking configurations will require configuration by the user, possibly requiring “chroot-ing” into the CoreCD environment from another Linux environment with working networking.

Resources for Sabayon Linux CoreCD 5.2:
Kernel Configuration:
- Sabayon 5.2 x86 kernel config
- Sabayon 5.2 amd64 kernel config

Packages list:
- Sabayon Linux 5.2 CoreCD x86 Packages
- Sabayon Linux 5.2 CoreCD x86-64 (amd64) Packages

Download sources
Our Mirrors Page:
- http://www.sabayon.org/download
Bittorrent:
- http://tracker.sabayon.org/

Sabayon 5.1 has had some major changes to the entropy system, which is the binary package manager and vital to your system. The first thing you want to do is get your /etc/entropy/repositories.conf updated to the latest URLS. This effects everybody by the way, even if you are rolling along with all updates. Here is a simple way to do it:

Open terminal

• 1. as user type su and enter root password
  2. cd /etc/entropy/
  3. mv /etc/entropy/repositories.conf /etc/entropy/repositories.old
  4. wget http://wolf911.us/sabayon/files/repositories.conf
  5. equo update –force

Now if you just did a fresh install, skip number 5 step and do this instead:

• equo update –force  && equo install entropy equo –nodeps && equo upgrade

Note -> that is two dashes/hyphens not one dash used, for instance – - force instead of -force

Fresh installs have to get the latest entropy before you can use it. I have also added these to our Known Issues wiki page.

If you are running the testing repo called Limbo, you can add them in repositories.conf file  with

repository|sabayon-limbo|Sabayon Linux Limbo Repository|http://pkg.sabayonlinux.org/entropy|http://pkg.sabayonlinux.org
repository|sabayon-limbo|Sabayon Limbo|http://na.mirror.garr.it/mirrors/sabayonlinux/entropy|http://pkg.sabayon.org,sabayon.org

You should than be set to go again with the testing branch.  Remember this branch can and will break systems.

This will all be fixed in 5.2.  Why was this done?  It helps us stabilize entropy to make it better for our users.  Thanks to your donations we can bring better services to you.  Have you guys noticed the speed of entropy lately?  I’m loving that speed!  We are getting close to a 1.0 release and it just gets better each day.  Thanks to Fabio for his hard work.  Please donate if you can to help us to continue to grow.  We have a big upcoming project to undertake, possibly new installer written from scratch.  Fabio will keep us informed on that idea.

Beta Status:

We have reached Sabayon 5.2 RC1 and is currently under testing.  The testing cycle is moving along very quickly.  I think there maybe some confusion as to BFS scheduler, it is not going to be default, it will be a (M) module status.  As far as a release date of 5.2, still looking at end of March, first part of April, keep fingers crossed.

The questions are flowing in and people are getting excited about seeing blue.  Yes, the 5.2 artwork is getting around and people are noticing.  Of course, if you have been using limbo repository you would of been blue for quite some time now.  That Ian sure can make some magic happen with the artwork.  I don’t think it’s fully completed yet, so if you notice something not right, hang on, it’s a coming.  So when do we plan to release this 5.2 beast is the big question burning in the minds.  Right now, everything is pointing to end of March for a final 5.2 release.  The testers group just got the beta isos the other day and are underway of testing and reporting.  It didn’t even have the new artwork packages when it was released so it’s looking pretty identical to 5.1 at the moment.  So what are the changes thus far?

• – In sync with latest repository updates
• – Several Installer fixes (see gitweb)
• – Grub2 support (enabled by default)
• – Removed several unused packages to make ISO images slimmer
• – Ability to live-check installer fixes (if issues arise) by just spawning “cd /opt/anaconda && git pull”
• – Improved boot speed (thanks to latest OpenRC)
• – 2.6.32 kernel by default

Other business, pulseaudio, yes that beloved thing that we are all cussing and beating under the rug.  Tonight, Fabio, Joost and I poked fun at pulseaudio, threatened to remove it, tried several different things and we came to a conclusion that on amd64 the flash is buggy.  It doesn’t work with hulu at the moment.  I even saw on sabayon forum of other sites not working on the amd64 platform.  For me, pulse seems to work with everything, but flash + pulse applications.  This is the only trouble I have ran into.  To get around most of this issue, I have set application preferences to use alsa and I’m using hulu desktop, which is in our entropy.  You can kill pulseaudio totally with the mv /usr/bin/pulseaudio /usr/bin/pulseaudio.old and than restart. How you handle it, it’s up to you, but either way, flash and pulseaudio fixes has to come from upstream, so we wait.  No decisions have been made as of yet for pulseaudio.  Do not look for it to go away just yet.

This is a personal thanks to Fabio as this was my request.  I never liked the progress status on the tab of Sulfur as it never made me feel 100% sure it was done and all was good.  So now it says Tasks completed successfully when it’s done!  No more wondering if it’s safe to close Sulfur.  Thanks Fabio!

We want to start a new fund-raiser and this is an important one I feel.  You all remember the mirror issues we had a couple weeks ago right?  We want to prevent that in the future and we need the help of  our users.  Financial funds have already been put in place directly from the pockets of a few sabayon core members to help with this.  Lets help them back  so they don’t have to take the full blow of these extra costs.  Some other costs we are running into  is spreading the word.  We have members hitting the Linux events and putting on displays and handing out disks to new people.  They are donating the time, but it still costs money to spread the word.  All donations go directly into the project to give more back to the world.  Thank you to each and every one of you that take the time to send in a few dollars.

Anyway,  we will keep you up on the latest 5.2 happenings.  Remember now, 5.2 and the end of March is what we are looking at.  If you are doing your equo update &&  equo world, you are current and rolling along, so no worries for you.

Oh, please do make sure that you keep your entropy to latest version before anything.  Anyone doing a fresh install or upgrade, please do equo update && equo install entropy equo sulfur –nodeps && equo upgrade.  It’s vital to have latest entropy version.

Wow, feels like I haven’t blogged in a long time.  Time is flying by with the new year heading into February already.  I decided I would take a look at 5.1 x86 KDE edition since it’s been a long time since I have messed with x86 and KDE.  I slotted myself some time, which was my first mistake as I was rushed to it and it came back to bite me.  Silly mistakes when rushed can turn something into a much longer ordeal.  I’ll give you the details.

Booted up the iso and everything was working out of the box and so I kicked the installer in and updated it and went ahead with my install.  I did a manual partition with reiserfs and of course told it to skip the bootloader as I already have grub setup.  After install I went in and edited my grub.conf file and here is where it got me.  Being lazy I took the line above it from my MCE x86_64 line and copied and pasted it.  I did change the kernel so it was . 31 from .32, but that was it.  You see what is going to happen?  My paths are all pointing to a correct kernel of the x86_64 path.  I tell it to reboot and this is where my troubles start.

As it reboots I am not paying attention and soon get the KDM login screen and I log in, but my resolution is all wrong.  I copy over my existing xorg.conf that works fine and checked with my eselect opengl list and had to changed it to nvidia.  I restart xdm and there I sit at a black screen with a blinking cursor.  I check the Xorg log and it says nvidia not loaded.  I thought ok, let’s reboot and upon reboot I get greeted with the same blank screen and this time I noticed on boot about a bunch of stuff having issues.  So than I start to think maybe nvidia driver is not installed properly and fire up equo update and it spits out at me it can’t connect.  Odd, networking worked fine on the live version.  I run net-setup and it can’t find a single network device.  Now I am thinking, is my kernel compiled without the drivers, no that wouldn’t make sense.  I’m digging through the gentoo networking documentation now and nothing is making sense.  After an hour of scratching my head I noticed on one of the reboots that my host was saying x86_64.  So I head back into grub.conf file and start looking at the line.  Sure enough my root (x,x) was point to my 64 bit install, argh!  Edited that and rebooted into my desktop.  This is what happens when a person gets lazy and doesn’t pay attention.

Next goal was to get the latest entropy system.  This is critical for anyone that is installing a 5.1 system.  The method that works best for this is to equo update to get the repositories updated than do equo install entropy equo sulfur –relaxed as that will pull in the needed files without the 100+ other updates. I should mention that I did add the limbo repo also.  Now I got the latest entropy system and since Fabio has been riding me about how fantastic the new Sulfur is I thought fine, I would do the upgrade/world with Sulfur and see what happens.  I’ve never been a fan of Sulfur as I prefer the terminal, but I do have to admit, Sulfur is looking pretty good.  The updates tab was showing my something like 300+ updates, but was kinda confused as how to select em all as I didn’t want to go down each line and select upgrade.  I hit Ctrl + a and it selected em all and than left clicked on a package and than right click and marked upgrade.  It kinda paused for a moment after that, but it did select all for upgrade after that.  I went over to actions and committed it and waited for it to download and install all packages.  I did have to ok some licenses, but Sulfur completed the task with no problems.  I don’t recall seeing a equo conf update tho, so I ran that and had a couple minor files to update.  Time to reboot and see how all went.  Well upon reboot I get the kdm login, but the desktop won’t load at all.  I could alt +  F2 and run applications tho, so it was just the KDE desktop not loading.  I couldn’t find any thing that was pointing to an obvious solution.  For the heck of it I decided to do an equo install kde-meta and noticed it wanted to pull 229 packages.  I thought that was odd as I had just did the updates and there was no more to get.  So I did the kde-meta install and rebooted and was greeted with the full blown KDE upon logging in.  I kept  getting WICD popping up and wanting a password, which I didn’t have before, so I removed WICD as I wanted NM for testing.  I see on the forum others are posting about this too.  I thought everything was going good till I tried amarok and had no sound than it dawned on me that KDE usually has a start up tune and I hadn’t heard that.  I fired up a browser and had sound in flash along with VLC, and XBMC.  I went into System-Settings – sound and bumped my soundcard to the top of the list on everything but still nothing.  There was no pulseaudio in there tho.  Issuing the command as user pulseaudio -k brought back all the sounds.  I still don’t know what is up with that, but it will be looked into.

I believe now everything is running good.  I encourage everyone to check out the latest Sulfur and the git one actually has more new features that will be coming in.  Incase you missed it, entropy now has bash complete which is really sweet.  To get this up in konsole we have to make some changes to your konsole profile.

1.  Open Konsole and click on Settings to Edit Current Profile

2.  On the General tab you will see Command:  /bin/bash change that line to /bin/bash –login

3.  Let make sure it’s enabled with eselect bashcomp enable equo

4.  Now you need to kill all Bash and Konsole and restart it.  In Konsole all I did was killall -9 bash and than closed the Konsole window.  Now restart Konsole and to use it properly you need to  su - and than it will work.  Try out equo search ama <tab> <tab> and you can do same as user also, but will need to be root to install of course.  You can also enable and disable repos too, example:  equo repo enable sabayon-limbo or equo repo disable sabayon-limbo.

Next time you see Fabio, give him a big thanks for these awesome improvements.  Thanks again Fabio!