Planet Sabayon Linux

Sabayon

Well, this morning I was thinking that I need to blog a little bit more, so here I am. Things are going well on the Sabayon side, we released a nearly perfect miniEdition last week and that’s a good thing from the QA side.
Talking about future releases:

• We are going to have a Professional Edition (yeah Business Edition changed its name) with the new artwork soon.
• We are going to have a new Loop release cycle (3.5 Loop 1) in less than one month with a huge amount of features (Entropy Alpha-stage included)
• We are going to public the new artwork stuff and rework the whole Sabayon theme that will show up in the upcoming releases listed above

Entropy/Equo

Even if I prefer coding rather than blogging about Entropy these days (eheh, let me keep this kind of secrecy for now), I can’t hide the fact that today has been a great day for the whole project. I successfully upgraded a 3.4F installation to the current available binary packages using Equo (that contain X.Org 7.3 for example…). A lot of code is still missing (like etc-update alike function, env-update, post/pre install scripts and so on), but things are moving fast!

Gentoo relationship

Some of you hide behind their stupidity thinking of me like a robber. Well, it’s not that and those guys don’t really have any clue. Firstly, I’d say: “Welcome to the Open Source world”. What I’m doing is building a mutual relationship among our project and some really kind Gentoo developers. I can’t hide the fact that drobbins always lays around #sabayon on irc.freenode.org and with him, you could see some pro-Sabayon Gentoo developers. It’s really nice to see that. I gave a lot to Gentoo, just think about the fact that even a newbie can install and use our distribution, this gives to Gentoo three main advantages:

• Users are going to use the Gentoo toolchain (portage, ebuilds and so on…)
• Users can really start to understand how an Operating System works under the hood, thanks to Gentoo scalability
• Users can use bleeding edge software and rethink their view on Gentoo

Yeah, because Sabayon is just how Gentoo should be for me: user friendly and at the same time powerful. So if you hear someone saying that Sabayon is not Gentoo, try to ask him why Sabayon is built with catalyst, uses portage (at the moment) and has a /var/db/pkg tree. What’s the difference between Gentoo and Sabayon? The answer is up to you.

More about Gentoo in the next days

miniEditions will enter the final beta testing process in more or less 4 days. That’s a good news, indeed. 700Mb of full bleeding edge power. Another good news is about the next Sabayon Linux major release: I just unlocked the tree and started to recompile everything using GCC 4.2 and, for the x86 Edition, using -march=i686 instead of -march=i586

miniEditions

Ok, miniEditions are on the way. I’m working on them since Friday (eventually!).  They won’t support Equo yet, since I am actively working on something called “interdependency reduction”, some of you may understand what I mean. I always hated mono and mono-dependent packages, even if it’s a good language, from packagers’ side it can cause big headaches when dealing with limited media space.

Portage

I’m just trying the latest unstable release and the first impression is: “eventually something good!”. It seems much more reactive, finally. So, kudos to the Gentoo developers that are moving their asses. Well done!

Entropy

Creating a package manager from scratch is a hard work. Creating a binary-based package manager that is backward compatible with a source-based package manager might be even harder. I finally had the time to work a little bit more on the backend tools of Entropy and I’m happy to say that I’ve reduced the complexity and the average time required to get things done. Enzyme is not needed anymore and Reagent can just automatically understand which packages need to be packetized and which not. What I mean is that I can now use emerge to do all the mess I want on the chroot and then just run “reagent update”. No wrappers, no unstable code, no hardcoded dependencies between emerge (and its output sometimes) and enzyme: portageTools are enough (for the newcomes, portageTools is my interface library between Portage Python “API” and Entropy – more or less 1000 lines of code).

The next steps will be:

• Reorganize branches support (following the “KISS” rule) # This will cause some issues during the move for the Equo testers
• Add conflicts support to Equo (…package1 conflicts with package2, ok?)
• Complete the world function (equo world == emerge world, ok?)

I’m also happy to see that a lot of people submitted a bug report using the Equo Crash Handler(TM). Yeah, it’s really awesome.

Sponsorship

I don’t want to add much now. But I’m in contact with one big company that will probably become our great and amazing sponsor. One thing, remember these words, from the Community side, this company really rocks, trust me. It’s VP, is really, really a cool guy.

Yep, our project is desperately looking for a sponsor. If you run a business and would like to sponsor us, feel free to write me directly. What we would need:

• Money
• Machinery
• Man power

As known as “the three M”.

…in the meantime, I can tell you that Sabayon Linux 3.4F is coming in few hours.