Planet Sabayon Linux

When I switch to gnome over a year ago I really missed the ability to have tabs in my file manager like Konqueror did. Nautilus is great, but I love tabs, why open another window when you can tab and keep it all in one spot? I see PCMan is recommended, but never gave it a thought. I finally decided to give it a try and now all I can ask is why didn’t I install this a long time ago. It’s not in portage, but it is in the gentoo-taiwan overlay with the latest version (layman -a gentoo-taiwan). I had server problems downloading the file so I just grabbed it myself and tossed it into /etc/portage/distfiles and emerged it. So if the ebuild fails to download the file just grab it yourself too. Pictures from left to right starting with top row. 1st one is the default look. 2nd one shows after I right clicked on a folder and told it to open in a new tab. The third one showing the file permissions.

2nd Row left to right – 1st one is showing the preferences and the second one is showing multiple tabs. The 3rd one is a root window.

You can drop and drag files and folders between the tabs and one nice thing is you can open a folder and as root. So if you need to edit your xorg file you could just browse /etc/X11 and than click on Tool in the menu and select open current folder as root, than you edit your file. The open folder as root options open another window and is different color so know you are root.  It’s definitely worth trying out if you a tabs kinda person.  I wish one was able to change the background color, but I can live with it as is.

Well in case you didn’t update your Compiz-Fusion lately to the latest svn stuff, you’re missing out on two new things I noticed. You can now make the cube a cylinder or a tube effect. I didn’t care for the tube effect so went with the cylinder shots. I’ve been updating the Professional Edition of Sabayon. It really is a great operating system and I keep it current with portage stable. I try to keep everything as stable branch and it’s rock solid. I actually do all my linux gaming on this operating system even. It’s too bad we don’t have a developer that can pick up the professional edition back up and continue it. There is always hope in the future yet.

Entropy

Ten days ago, I successfully completed the refactoring of the server-side code (which triggered Entropy 0.14 release). It’s been a clear and complete success. Let me explain why:

1. Code is now faster and cleaner, this means less bugs
2. ServerInterface and ServerMirrorsInterface now support multiple repositories. This triggered the creation of a sandbox/testing repository where all the critical updates will be flushed into for testing. We decided to name it “Jenna” but I won’t tell you after what. If you’ve undestood the nature of the repository, you might get it. So, the new interface is now able to switch to one and another and handle all our deepest wishes. Talking about facts, we already used “Jenna” for testing OpenRC & Baselayout 2.0 along with some X.Org patches and the new kernel (linux-sabayon-2.6.25). Read more later
3. Automatic QA routines: it means, QA controls can be easily implemented and hooked in various parts of the code, one already implemented is the automated missing RDEPEND (dependencies) check, which translates the libraries needed by a package to their owners, also thanks to my studies on the ELF format (evidence: http://pastebin.fr/1471 ). Two funny things emerged:
   1. There are a lot of missing RDEPENDs and it’s a pain to report them upstream sometimes.
   2. Applications creators don’t pay much attention when dealing with a broken by design app like autoconf is.

   A future QA routine I’m going to implement will be “libtest”, like “equo libtest” but ran on the content of a list of packages. This will avoid having broken packages in repository and not notice them.

4. Prepared the path to EAPI=3 (as in Entropy API, revision 3), in a few words: differential updates. This will trim down the time needed to update a repository through Equo/Spritz to a few seconds.

Entropy CORE library is now 20000 lines of code, and I think it will double its size before the end of the year after having added a first chunk of the Spritz “Your Ego” feature.

Along with this refactoring, Entropy 0.14 brough some visible improvements for end users:

1. EquoInterface: improved database queries speed from 20 to 1000% (world updates calculation is now 10x faster)
2. Spritz: improved speed by a good 400% making it really usable
3. Spritz: added a cute GLSA (Security Advisories) interface to keep your system secure
4. Spritz: connected its crash dialog to our errors reporting infrastructure
5. Spritz: implemented searches on TreeViews to ease the search of a package through the list
6. Spritz: cleaned up spritz.pot (the translation template). We need translators!
7. Notification Applet: enable/disable option (if you don’t want it to bug you)
8. Equo/Spritz/Notification Applet: made repositories management possible as user (you can run tasks such as “equo update” just by being in the “entropy” group)
9. Equo/Spritz/Notification Applet: a lot of bug fixes
10. EquoInterface downloader now uses a custom HTTP User Agent string. This makes statistics collection possible. We can see what’s the most downloaded package, how many users use Entropy and so forth.

Talking about future, depending on the amount of donations we’ll receive (I’ll be a bit outta cash starting from the next month), here are Entropy plans for 0.15:

• Community Repositories: now that the server-side code is refactored, I can (eventually) start working on this. In this way, users will be able to create their own overlayed repository providing packages with different use flags or features in general.
• Your Ego services: let me keep a bit of secrecy here. Eheh.
• Spritz: it’s not yet feature complete. So, some coding is required
• PROFIT! (that’s the most important thing huh?)

Sabayon Linux 3.5 Loop3

The last chapter of Sabayon Linux 3.5 is being written as I write. I can anticipate you a few features:

• Improved boot speed (standard boot in around 15-25 seconds) mostly thanks to having moved /etc/init.d/xdm to the “boot” runlevel, but also to OpenRC and Baselayout 2.0.
• Installer: custom package selector, achieved embedding Spritz into Anaconda.
• 2.6.25 Kernel with improved hardware detection.

Expected release date: first days of May 2008.
To close this huge blog post, have a look at some Spritz (SVN) screenshots

I’ve been running the new baselayout and openrc for a bit now and I have to say I like it very much. I think this is a good move as in the future it will make upgrading easier. A new baselayout use to terrify the community, but this way should ease the pain of that. Gentoo is going to moving it all into ~ arch soon. This will effect all Sabayon Linux users and they should get familiar with it. They do a great job with a Migration Guide that explains what is what.

What’s baselayout?

Baselayout provides a basic set of files that are necessary for all systems to function properly, such as /etc/hosts. It also provides the basic filesystem layout used by Gentoo (i.e. /etc, /var, /usr, /home directories).

What’s OpenRC?

OpenRC is a dependency-based rc system that works with whatever init is provided by the system, normally /sbin/init. However, it is not a replacement for /sbin/init. The default init used by Gentoo Linux is sys-apps/sysvinit, while Gentoo/FreeBSD uses the FreeBSD init provided by sys-freebsd/freebsd-sbin.

Rest of Migration Guide

Lately I have been getting sick and tired of graphical IM, I like aMSN for MSN clients but wait I have 3 MSN accounts, that’s 3 wish’s processes and believe me, that’s too much !! I tried using Pidgin, but I didn’t like it compared to aMSN, If I want to use a graphical messenger I’d like it to be fully featured… I have decided to go to a much more appealing solution, a textual one, but hey I already use mutt for my mail, and ViM for everything I write, So I don’t mind a textual messenger…

As you already know, I have my own server, always running, so I figured why not having the IM client on my server, this way I’ll always be online, anyone can leave me messages, So I have installed Bitlbee which is an IRC server that does the communications between your IRC client and the IM servers, it supports AIM, Google Talk, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo etc…

So now I use Irssi + Bitblee on GNU Screen to chat with 3 MSN, 1 Yahoo and 1 Google Talk account, and beleive me it changes the way you used to chat, well first you won’t have many useless open windows all over your desktop, all your chats will be in the &bitlbee channel on your Irssi, It’s perfect…. but wait a second…. how would I know if someone talks to me ?? since it’s on the server, not on the PC I use, there must be a solution on how to get notifications when someone talks to me right ?? well there is a very good one… ( One that works with a simple Irssi, anyone who talks to me over any channel or in private I’ll be notified… ) …

The idea is to make Irssi write everything addressed to you ( highlighted or via PM ) to an external file,then on the other computer you’ll ssh to the server, read the file line by line and use notify-send to send notifications, here’s a small tutorial on how to do it, I’ll explain both server and client side…

• Server side:
  First download the fnotify.pl perl script (kudos to Thorsten Leemhuis), and put it in your ~/.irssi/scripts folder then make sure it’s auto loaded ( cd ~/.irssi/scripts; ln -s ../fnotify.pl fnotify.pl ), this script will write everything addressed to you in the ~/.irssi/fnotify file, it doesn’t matter if you are marked away or not, which is the desired behavior…
• Client side:
  Download the IrssiNotify bash script, and put it somewhere in your $PATH, make sure you edit it, you need to customize it with the address if the server you would like to connect to, then launch it, if you’d like to launch it automatically when you launch gnome, just put this IrssiNotify.desktop in your ~/.config/autostart folder…
  But hold on, there’s still one issue, if you are online and chatting on Irssi, you will still receive messages from IrssiNotify, I mean that was the whole point of it, to receive notifications whether you are online or away, but I gotta admit, this is annoying… The solution was simple, if ~/.disableIrssiNotify exists, then the IrssiNotify script will simply discard any notification instead of sending it through notify-send… so a simple keybinding was in place, I assigned
  <Ctrl><Shift>d to:
  touch ~/.disableIrssiNotify; notify-send -i gtk-dialog-info -t 10000 -- "IrssiNotify Disabled" "IrrsiNotify has been disabled, to enable it please use <Ctrl><Shift>e"
  and
  <Ctrl><Shift>e to:
  rm -f ~/.disableIrssiNotify; notify-send -i gtk-dialog-info -t 10000 -- "IrssiNotify Enabled" "IrrsiNotify has been enabled, to disable it please use <Ctrl><Shift>d"
  Sorry but I won’t cover keybinding setup thoroughly , you just need to edit /apps/metacity/global_keybindings and /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands using gconf-editor, google a bit you will find a lot of tutorials on this subject

I finally have a consistent, lightweight IM messenger, that I can use from any computer via SSH, there’s a lot of benefits, the most important for me are the logs, and the simplicity…. I LOVE IT

P.S: The notification method is not limited to SSH, you could easly modify the IrssiNotify bash script to read the ~/.irssi/fnotify file on your machine, it shouldn’t be that hard

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Finally getting around to posting KDE 4.0.3 screenshots. I am surprised at how fast 4.0.3 hit portage. You can visit the changelog to see what has changed. I’m not noticing much difference in stability, but haven’t used it a lot yet either. I noticed the taskbar was kinda flaking out and amarok would mess up playing mp3s at random. I decided to go ahead and build the latest svn compiz-fusion with the kde4 USE flag to enable it. Some of the effects you see are from compiz-fusion being enabled.

There is so many talented people out there and I think the wallpaper collection has been long forgotten. I went through the Sabayon Linux forum and tried to get all the possible wallpapers that the community has posted and there is quite a few. I decided to add them all here on their own page. I will keep my eye out as they roll in and add to the page. If you hover over the pictures you will see the various sizes in your status bar.

Great Work Guys, Keep it up!

Hello,

Do you like the famous wget? but you would like to have a more advanced program? Open your arms and welcome the aria2 software, I have been using it for more than a year now and I thought it deserve an article on my blog, specially the integration with firefox 3, we’ll discuss it later in this article…

Aria2 is a very good command line download manager it supports ordinary links, metalink and torrents as well, very fast and doesn’t use a lot of resources, it also supports up to 5 connection per mirror ( if you specify for example 10 mirrors for the same file and 5 connection to each one, you’ll get 50 simultaneous connections… ) and most importantly it supports reading cookies from firefox’s cookies file, the problem is that it doesn’t read cookies.sqlite ( the one used with firefox 3) but cookies.txt ( used in firefox 1 and firefox 2 ), in this article I will provide a workaround on how to use the cookies.sqlite file untill aria2’s developers come up with a better solution…

I used an alias for aira2c that loads the firefox cookies file automatically

alias aria2c="aria2c --load-cookies='${HOME}/.mozilla/firefox/eMxyzptlk/cookies.txt'"

But this does not work with firefox 3, I had to make a script called dumpcookies based on a small implementation that I have found here. The new alias would be something like this:

alias aria2c="dumpcookies -i '${HOME}/.mozilla/firefox/eMxyzptlk/cookies.sqlite' -o '/tmp/cookies.txt' &> /dev/null; chmod 600 '/tmp/cookies.txt' &> /dev/null; aria2c --load-cookies='/tmp/cookies.txt'"

This alias will make aria2c convert firefox’s cookies to a text file on each call and writes it to /tmp ( it also makes it readable only by your user so you’ll remain safe.. ), and call aria2c with the converted cookies… It doesn’t delete it though!!

The aria2 documentation and man page are also a good reading…

P.S: here’s the complete alias I use, it is optimum:
alias aria2c="dumpcookies -i '${HOME}/.mozilla/firefox/eMxyzptlk/cookies.sqlite' -o '/tmp/cookies.txt' &> /dev/null; chmod 600 '/tmp/cookies.txt' &> /dev/null; aria2c --file-allocation=none --load-cookies='/tmp/cookies.txt' -c"
P.P.S: here’s my alias file in case you don’t want to copy/paste….

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