Planet Sabayon Linux

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.

KDE 4.4 Sabayon 5.2 beta

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!

Sulfur

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!

The Sabayon Linux CoreCD 5.1 release is available for download now at Sabayon’s mirror sites:http://www.sabayonlinux.org/mirrors

This updated release keeps with the tradition of the CoreCD 4.2 release. The CoreCD is designed with a minimalistic feature set to provide a foundation for building a customized installation tailored to the users specific needs.

As with the previous CoreCD release, CoreCD is a text-based release. There is no X-Server, Gnome, or KDE
provided.

Feature list:
• Bootable Image suitable for a CD or USB thumb drive (~300MB-350MB)
• Text-Based installer
• Basic default networking
• Entropy and Portage ready

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.

I just love twitter, especially right after we do a release. The #Sabayon tweets just rise up in record numbers. My favorite twitter client is TweetDeck. I can setup a column that just sits and monitors for #Sabayon. I see all the tweets and can holler out to people. I was able to get TweetDeck working on my funtoo install, but it really raises havoc with the web browser when it came to flash sites. It just literally crashed the browser right off my desktop. So, it does work on the linux, but really isn’t the desired effect I was hoping for. I usually bounce between twittux and there is a firefox add-on that isn’t to bad either. I really like having the search/monitor feature tho. I do hope TweetDeck picks up Identi.ca in the future #Sabayon.   If anyone has a great method of using TweetDeck and keeping a stable environment, let me know.

So last night, I am looking over the recent #Sabayon posts and find that Linux Live USB Creator has a beta version out that now supports Sabayon.  This is great news as it is another powerful tool for people to use to try out Sabayon.  It’s a simple windows program that allows you to turn a USB key into a bootable operating system.  What is really nice about this, you can use it and boot it up right in windows.  No need to reboot to use it.  It has the option to download, you will need internet for this option, a portable Sun VirtualBox version.  It’s the portable version, so it’s not installing stuff on your computer ever.  It’s completely safe to use this option.  Now you can fire up Sabayon right up on your desktop.  How cool is that?  I highly recommend that you adjust the settings in VB first as the defaults are set too low.  I went in and bumped up the RAM and Video RAM, this produced a much better experience for me.  So now I have my USB key and all I have to simply do is insert it into any computer and I can launch Sabayon through the VirtualBox.  The interface is straight forward, awesome!

Linux Live USB Creator

Of course you can not install Sabayon from within Windows.  You will need to boot the computer up with the USB key to do your installation. Booting up the computer with the USB key is same thing as booting it up with a dvd disk.  I did notice tho, the menu options aren’t there like they normally are.  You just have to hit enter if you don’t need to add any cheat codes in.  Linux Live USB Creator has persistence abilities also, I’m not sure how that works.  I know what it is, but don’t know with what it works with.  I encourage you to check out the homepage and read through the FAQ and Guides.  If you find the program useful, drop the guy a small donation too.  It’s things like this that make things easier for people.  Remember tho, if you want to try this out, You Must Have the Beta Version 2.3 Beta.

My Windows 7 Desktop

Linux Live USB Creator in Action

A quick side note, core-cd rc1 has been released out to the testing team.  Mitch is doing a fantastic job at cleaning it up.  Last I saw, it was only at like 378mb in size.  I’m hoping we can get this released soon.  I believe he had to make a couple more changes and than I am sure it will be golden.   So hold on, it’s coming!

Why VLOS you may ask, well hang on and you will see how Sabayon’s entropy and molecule is helping others produce their own distros. I was browsing distrowatch the other night and noticed that VLOS has come back to life. I thought to myself, hey, I had tried that distro out back in like 2006. I started checking it out and I soon discovered that VLOS is using the entropy package manager and it’s built off of Daniel Robbins’s funtoo stages.  So you start off with the ground work of funtoo and than maintain it with entropy via the vidalinux repository. They do manage their own repository and branches, currently at a branch 2 setting. I was able to switch out the repositories config file and load Sabayon’s default one. There is a lot of sabayon in VLOS and I felt right at home. Even tho it is an alpha release, it ran great for me. You can find their package list to see what is all included. The installer is the same installer we currently use. You’ll see a lot of Sabayon stuff as you use it.  I have no idea who or what is behind this project tho.  The documentation on their website is kinda scarce and not sure what their future plans are.

Gnome is the default desktop

VLOS Gnome Desktop amd64

Desktop stuff in action – notice the sabayonuser

VLOS Busy Desktop

And the ever famous Sulfur

VLOS and Sulfur

This is the second distro that I know of that is using entropy as their main package manager.  Cuba came out with a distro called Nova a while back and they are using entropy.  I have no experience with their distro.  We currently have another guy developing another linux distro based on Sabayon tools also. This is all good and exciting stuff to see.  Sabayon Linux is making a difference for many.    I would like to hear from those that are currently using our tools to build their distros.  Drop us a line and let us know.   If you are looking to do something like this, I suggest looking at molecule.  Fabio should be proud of himself and the best part, he is willing to help these developers.  He will take the time out of his busy day and answer questions.

If you are using Limbo repository with your sabayon linux, sys-kernel/linux-sabayon-2.6.32 has been added to it. It doesn’t get automatically pulled with equo world, but the other files will. Now for me, my experience was fine. I am world updated with limbo and have the nvidia-drivers unmasked (GeForce 9500 GT). I went ahead and did the equo update && equo world. Once that was done, I did equo install linux-sabayon and than equo install nvidia-drivers. Remember after kernel installs, your drivers/modules need to match up. The install of the kernel doesn’t pull these. Installing the linux-sabayon should set your eselect kernel list properly and also edit your grub.conf file properly, double check to make sure. I had no issues with x11-drivers/xf86-input-xxxxxx drivers without reinstalling them.

If you are an ATI user, apparently the ati-drivers don’t work yet, so you will need to use the xorg-x11 open source drivers. Joost has a 3870 HD ATI and X was unusable with the ati-drivers. He also says you can try appending nomodeset or radeon.modeset=0 to your grub line if having problems with open source drivers. darthlukan reports with his ATI XPRESS 200M Radeon and open source drivers, all good and didn’t have to append anything.

Of course your mileage will vary, you been warned. I would be curious to your finding tho. Click on title to leave comment.

Now that Fabio has released Sabayon 5.1-r1 mini-dvds, you might be wondering what is up with the -r1 appended to the iso file. This seems to cause confusion every time we do this and we try to avoid it, but we had 5.0 iso and were set to release it, but we discovered some last minute bugs and caused a slight delay in release. So our 5.1 iso was revised to revision 1 to take care of the bugs for release. It’s all good, and no there will not be a -r2 or -r3 release of 5.1. The next release at this time is slotted for a 5.2 release.

You may remember my last post on Sabayon with Gnome Shell. Well, with the release of 5.1-r1 Gnome, gnome-shell is included and you can try it out for yourself. Please see my previous post for screenshots of gnome-shell in action.

If you have 5.0 Gnome and been rolling it along and would like to have gnome-shell also to play with, you can install it via our overlay or via entropy with equo install gnome-shell or emerge gnome-shell if using our overlay. It appears we also need to install equo install gir-repository also, emerge it if using portage. To start the gnome-shell interface open up terminal and type in gnome-shell –replace as user, don’t need to sudo or su and it should kick in. To get your desktop back to normal gnome, just close the terminal box. You should be able to start it up with gnome-shell –replace& if you don’t want to keep the terminal box open. I would love to hear feedback on what you guys think of gnome-shell.

Oh yea, one big change on the mini-dvd is the usernames and passwords. They always use to be root with password root and sabayonuser with password sabayonuser. The user names are the same, but there is no passwords now. So if you punch in su on the live mini-dvd, you will get the password prompt, just hit enter and you will be root. I found that hard to get use to after all these years. I kept typing in root by habit and than it would spit the authentication fail message at me. So remember, live mini-dvd, just hit enter if asked for password.

I hope your experiences with Sabayon 5.1-r1 are good. It took a bit longer to get it here, but I think you will find it was worth the wait. I’m hoping Mitch can get the core-cd out now also, so keep an eye out for that release.