We are well known for our beautiful artwork here at Sabayon, and I would like to share this amazing cartoon, produced by wolfden.
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.
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.
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:
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!
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!
The sysinfo:/ kioslave (aka “My Computer”) in konqueror is one of my favourite KDE3.5 features, I saw that SuSE and Fedora had this working so decided to “port” it over to sabayon, so after a few hours of playing around (my term for Sabayon work lol) there is one more thing off my list, w00t. Got that sorted yesterday, after a little patch to get it to compile and some custom artwork the result is shown at the bottom of this page:
Got a list of more stuff to-do however, =D.
If you are wondering about the network status, it picks it up from network manager, I use wicd, so thats not showing up. Its on the overlay now so if you want to try it, or if joost_op is awake you could use equo, this will be added to branch 5 only.
equo install kio-sysinfo
or
emerge -av kio-sysinfo
On an unrelated note if anyone has an ATI (r600+) which they would like to donate, that would be great. Im a Nvidia user personally but have been wanting to test ATi stuff.
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.
ooooh Pretty SVGness
Lately I have been quite busy with many different (usually sabayon-related) things. A main focus is trying to come up with a a nice theme for 5.0, which is is proving interesting to say the least.
For the mean time however I have created some artwork for the CoreCD, which I have dubbed “Sabayon.Core”. The core CD is targetted at intermediate users who want to build their system as they see fit. It is designed to “sabayon-infy” a gentoo stage 3 by providing an simple text based installer and up to date packages, as well as a solid core upon which you can build with either entropy or portage. The work Mitch is doing on this is great, it still amazes me what the sabayon community is doing with so few real “devs” working on it.
So, without further adieu, a preview image for the Sabayon.Core v1. o bootsplash / fbsplash theme:
Image is CC-SA-A-v3.0 Ian Whyman 2009
The dark red and black is homage to the 3.3 / 3.4 black and “blood” red and is supposed to be clean and classy and suitably dark for use a terminal background, a user on IRC commented that it looks like a red curtain, which didnt occur to me at the time.