Planet Sabayon Linux

I’ve been getting a few people wondering what and when to expect another release.  Well so far the testers team has only gotten the Gnome mini-dvd alpha 4.1 so far.  It required the lesser amount of work to get out for testing.  The testing has been going well for the Gnome.  KDE mini-dvd alpha 4.1 has not been released to testers yet as this will be our first release of a mini-dvd KDE 4.2.1 edition so it’s a bit more work.  We do not have a set date of a release, as always, it will be done when it’s done.  Stay tuned for more information.

The core-cd edition has not been release to testers yet either.  Core-cd edition will be for those that want to basically have a minimal install and to build their own desktop and programs via package manager.  This has been heavily requested by users.  I’m not sure how easy the core-cd will be for people new to linux tho.  I will assume the core-cd will be intended for the more advanced users.

Branch 4 has been a learning experience for us and we have been looking at the issues that users ran into.  A perfect example is Branch 4 started with kernel 2.6.27 and is currently at  2.6.29.  A person doing a fresh install and than doing a world update ran into problems with drivers/modules as they didn’t know that when you change kernels, one must rebuild these drivers/modules to new kernel.  So do we lock branches to only have one kernel to prevent users from breaking things and screaming for support?  It is common knowledge in the linux world about this kernel stuff, but as we see, we have a lot of people that just don’t understand that.  I can already hear the advanced users going, what about modules/drivers that depend on a higher kernel.  I hear ya, it’s nice to keep rolling along with updates so it doesn’t get to be such a large break between branches.  If you are world updating branch 4 you are pretty much current with development and this makes for an easy transition to the next branch.   When 4.1 rolls out to the mirrors, you are pretty much 4.1 already.  I am curious as to what your thoughts are on this.  If you want to leave a comment, click the title of this post – DVD-minis Core-cd Updates.

Please note we do have a world updating 101 thread on the forum to help users grasp it.  I tried to include the issues that we are seeing from users.

After not giving a shit for so long and while I am working out some Sabayon 4.1 details, I made the move! Entropy codebase is the first that switched to Git. Other switches will follow during this Spring and hopefully, we’ll turn OFF Subversion by this year’s end. Now I have a new toy to play with, and it’s the best toy I’ve ever played with. Welcome Git, goodbye Subversion! Many thanks go to Vincenzo Di Massa, my collegue at Itsme and hopefully a Sabayon team-mate in the future!

You can have a look at our fresh gitweb interface here: http://gitweb.sabayon.org

Hey everyone, we want your youtube videos of you using Sabayon Linux.  I was browsing the youtube site the other day and noticed that Sabayon Linux 4.0 videos are lacking.  If we like your video, we will be adding it to our main page.  Leave a comment with a link to your video.  Please do not use a webcam pointing to your monitor either, that is just wrong.  Use a program like recordmydesktop, which can be installed via entropy with equo install recordmydesktop, bonus points to those with cool music in the background.  Be creative also, wobbly windows, everyone has seen that already.  Lets see what you can come up with, wheather it be cool, fun, educational, gaming,  post it.

I run across people that get confused as to what a GUI is.  Of course a GUI stands for Graphical User Interface and can be applied several ways and methods, but I want to focus on 3 things for this post.  I want to keep this simple so new people don’t get lost.  There is plenty of articles on the internet that can go much further into details.  The 3 I want to hit on are Xorg, Desktop Environment and Window Manager.  Some believe that KDE is an Operating System when in fact it is a Desktop Environment.

Lets Start with Xorg via gentoo documentation

The X.org project created and maintains a freely redistributable, open-source implementation of the X11 system. It is an open source X11-based desktop infrastructure.

Xorg provides an interface between your hardware and the graphical software you want to run. Besides that, Xorg is also fully network-aware, meaning you are able to run an application on one system while viewing it on a different one.  Source

So in a nutshell, it allows you to have a Desktop Environment/Window Manager.

Desktop Environment from the wiki:

A desktop environment typically consists of icons, windows, toolbars, folders, wallpapers, and desktop widgets.

Software which provides a desktop environment might also provide drag and drop functionality and other features which make the desktop metaphor more complete. On the whole, a desktop environment is to be an intuitive way for the user to interact with the computer using concepts which are similar to those used when interacting with the physical world, such as buttons and windows.

So in a nutshell it is like a complete suite of applications with all having graphical interfaces.  You are no longer stuck in a shell looking at a blinking cursor.  This is where your KDE, Gnome, and XFCE come in at.  You can find others here.  Don’t forget, these all depend on Xorg being installed.

Window Manager from wiki

is computer software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system in a graphical user interface.  Most window managers are designed to help provide a desktop environment. They work in conjunction with the underlying windowing system which provides required functionality such as support for graphics hardware, pointing devices, and a keyboard, and are often written and created using a widget toolkit.

So in a nutshell it works with a Desktop Environment allowing you more options.  A great example of a window manager is compiz-fusion.  You can’t install compiz-fusion on top of Xorg and have a working GUI.  There is a lot more window managers than desktop environments out there, find more here.

This stuff goes way more in depth, like window managers for X and the debates of  WM vs. DE etc… but I just wanted to let the new people to linux get an understanding of this.  So to keep things straight, you have an operating system in which you install Xorg onto. You decide which Desktop Environment you want to run and install it on top of Xorg.  Than if you want, you can enhance your Desktop Environment with a Window Manager.

I myself use a Desktop Environment of Gnome with the window manager awesome.  Now you take a look at the screenshot of awesome and wonder how that can be an enhancement.  Well for me, I prefer to use commandline for a lot of stuff and use some GUI tools.  awesome allows me to do both without fully loading the Gnome Desktop Environment.  So it’s all about preferences and if you have a machine with low resources, a window manager makes a great alternative as it will eat lesser resources.

So now when someone asks you which linux distribution you are running, you know now not to say KDE.  You can state Sabayon Linux with KDE.  You may think it’s crazy that linux does this, but in reality it all applies the same with Microsoft Windows.  If you ever saw Windows 3.1 or 3.0, you would know exactly what I mean.  You can use window managers to change Microsoft desktop environment.  As you learn linux you see how it applies to Microsoft, but you just didn’t know as Microsoft is proprietary and in control, whereas with linux you have options.

So the million dollar question, which is best to use.  There is no right or wrong answer to this.  You have to try em out and decide which one works for you.  Don’t jump on a bandwagon and bash the others, respect that others have different preferences.  They all have their glitches and benefits.  New people do tend to find KDE easier to adopt to, but give them all a try.  If nothing else, it’s a great learning experience learning a new DE or WM.

I’ve added 4 pages to the blog here to help the community see the actions behind the scenes. You should see the new pages up in the right hand corner at all times. I’ve add the Sabayon Linux x86 and Sabayon Linux x86_64 pages to keep you up to date with the latest packages added to entropy branch 4. The Latest SVN page will keep you up to date of current projects being worked on. The Latest Overlay page will keep you up to date with the latest packages put into the Sabayon overlay. The overlay packages are for layman and emerge.  Packages that go into overlay will get built for entropy, so don’t think you’ll miss out.  We’ve always had rss feeds available for keeping up, but I think many had no idea and I hope this will help and make it easy to keep up by having it all here on the blog.

Two quick things:

The KDE fans should all be happy with KDE-4.2.1 hitting entropy, built with qt-4.5 for better performance.  On my amd64 x2 5200+ I had the KDE via entropy in about an hour and 1o minutes.  This is a great increase from a previous older install of KDE  I had done.  Some of you may experience faster times pending on your bandwidth and cpu.  Thanks to Joost for taking the time to update KDE.

You can see on the Latest Overlay page that v00d00 has brought in the new alpha artwork package.  I actually tested that package out and it’s looking great.  The emerge failed due to file collisions, but once I removed the collisions it installed just fine.  Can’t wait to see what Ian comes up with next.  Perhaps our new logo?  We’ll have to stayed tuned to the blog to find out.

Out for now…

A month ago we put a request out for translators and we got a nice response from people and we sent out a detailed email on directions for translating for those that replied.  We are quickly approaching a month and we haven’t heard back from any of the translators.  If you requested to help, can ya let us know a status so we at least know what is being worked on.  If you have questions or concerns or simply lost, let us know so we can help.

I would highly recommend for ease of contact that will get a timely response is to jump on to the dev mailing list.  You can sign up and stay in contact.  Once signed up, you should get a welcome letter with directions on how to send to the mailing list.  If you have questions in regard to translating, you can get help on the mailing list.

Thanks to everyone that wants to help with the translating.  We really do need to get the ball rolling here tho.