Planet Sabayon Linux

It’s has been a while since I last blogged something, sorry about that, I have no time lately! I just want to update you on things I am working on and things happened during this period

After a very long recruitment period, I eventually became a Gentoo developer, yay! I’ll be helping out in Gentoo Portage and KDE teams. This is a good thing for Sabayon, thanks to this we hope to be able to reduce our Portage overlay size (mostly containing build/misc fixes) by a good 60% by injecting changes (when possible) directly into the Portage tree.

Another funny thing is about to happen in a few days, Gentoo 10.0 and Sabayon 5.0 are being released (look at version numbers) in LiveDVD forms. While I cannot speak about Gentoo LiveDVD because I haven’t followed its release cycle, I can give you some hints regarding Sabayon 5.0: we’re going to ship with latest X.Org, KDE 4.3, GNOME 2.26, Linux kernel 2.6.31, Encryption (cryptsetup) support, XBMC 9.04.1, new artwork, etc etc, and, we are very very close to a final RC.

Funny is that, while I am working on finalizing 5.0, Joost has already prepared packages that will hit Sabayon 5.1 (and Entropy branch 5 after being tested). They are in the “sabayon-limbo” repository, our “very cutting-edge” repository that bring Sabayon in sync with Portage (~arch tree).

About Entropy itself, during these last months, I am focusing my attention on polishing the architecture, adding docstrings and bugfixes, all this would deserve a separate blog post actually.

Last but not least, we’ve been able to raise enough funds to buy two new RACK 1U servers from Dell (yay!). One has been already deployed at the University of Milan (Milano-Bicocca), IT dept. The other is on the way. Once all the stuff is done, I will write a very long (and with pics) blog report to thank you all, I promise, I’m just short on time at the moment

Well it’s official, Fabio is part of the Gentoo developers team now. This is a great thing for Sabayon and Gentoo. It didn’t come easy tho, but with support and his desire to do it, he did it. Our relationship with gentoo gets better and better all the time. One just has to put the negative comments aside and remember what is important, making it all better.

When Fabio said he was applying for Gentoo dev, I cringed as I knew it was gonna be a tough road, but he had good support pushing him and when he got down, we stood beside him to encourage him. He is an asset for Gentoo and has nothing but good intentions.

I should mention he did this process all while working on the betas and RCs of 5.0, while on vacation and returning back to university. One busy fella that always seems to reach his goal. I’m glad I have the chance to work along side of him and got to know him. Yea sure we bump heads once in a while, but we get over it.

As I write this, RC1 bugs are being fixed and expecting a RC2 here shortly. I also did a how to for switching branches on the wiki. It’s getting to be a frequent question so I hope I explained it well enough. Branch 5 is still going through changes yet, so expect issues yet. Please take the time tho and be sure to understand the package manager. I can’t stress learning the package manager enough. It’s just vital to know it.

Once again Congrats Fabio! You make us all proud!

Now with any major new release of GNOME you are going to get alot of “omg totally awesome new stuff in gnome!” posts. When there are blogs out there with names like “omgubuntu” you have to expect this.

Gnome 3.0 at its core seems to be gnome shell bolted onto a standard gnome 2.2x, with the primary purpose it seems of hyping gnome using a bigger version number. Maybe its because KDE is now soild and gnome think they need something closer to KDE’s Plasma?

However, I will watch with interest at what happens in regards to gnome shell, Its nice to see that if needed Gnome can do something new. Great. The real question is do you want it to do something new?

For me its a No, i don’t. Gnome is generally preferred by businesses building a working desktop out of Linux, why? Because its solid, predictable, a tried a tested desktop, why mess with it….that’s KDEs job!

That’s why it wont be included in ubuntu until late 2010 I suppose. Looking like Empathy all over again.

And breaking Compiz compatibility is not cricket. Its only really ever worked properly on Gnome, I’ve moved on to Kwin now but that is beside the point.

In other news, I’m very happy that you have all voted “HELL YEAH” to keeping libdvdcss for many of the reasons I originally gave to keep it, I have 0 clue why Fabio wanted it removed anyway.

It does mean however that we cant be included on cover disks of magazines, which is a shame, would love to see Sabayon on the cover of Linux Format, but playing DVDs out of the box is always a winner with me!

Just a short and quick update here. Yesterday the xdeltas were released to the testers to bring their beta2 disks to RC1 status. The xdeltas were around 200mb a pieces, so lots of fixes. We still do have a few known issues that we are waiting on, but things are starting to shape up fast it looks like. My projection is, there will be an RC2 and that will more than likely become the final version. I’ll guess a week and we should be sitting on a final, remember, just a guess.

On a side note we had asked a couple of places to help with hosting our ISO files and were denied because of the libdvdcss that is present. Incase one isn’t sure what that is, it’s what allows you to deal with DVDs. So what does one do? Drop the libdvdcss so servers will accept us and loose a wonderful feature for that OOTB experience? Yea sure you can install it afterwards and isn’t really a huge issue, or is it? I would like some feedback on this from our users. It’s caused some mixed emotions on the team. Are we turning into a generic distro?

Anyway, all I have time for now, I got stuffs to get done. Do voice your opinion on the libdvdcss thing tho!

Its been a little while since I posted on this blog but let me tell you in short whats going to happen very soon: - Sabayon 5.0 Release Candidate 1 will be released for testing. The Sabayon testing team went through 2 beta stages to get here so it should be fine for most people [...]

Thought I would share a little IRC session that me laugh.

Oh, and if you want useful information on Sabayon 5, please see Wolfden’s very useful planet post, inc pretty screenshots

This is the kind of thing that you see and dont expect it to happen to you! Ahh IRC.

Please join us on #sabayon on irc.freenode.net for sabayon help and to hang out with cool people like rakuen, lxnay, joost_op, DHalens, Azerthoth, tangent, wolfden and ofcourse Thev00d00.

Without further ado:

<rakuen--> /etc/init.d/net.eth0 restart gives me error-msg: "net.eth0 has started, but is inactive"
<Thev00d00> rakuen--: /etc/init.d/net.eth0 stop
<Thev00d00> rakuen--: /etc/init.d/net.eth0 zap
<Thev00d00> rakuen--: /etc/init.d/net.eth0 start
<darthlukan> what was the live root pass again?
<Thev00d00> darthlukan: on livecd "root"
<dave_64> darthlukan: root
<rakuen--> Thev00d00 same problem still
<darthlukan> thanks
<Thev00d00> rakuen--: lan or gfx?
<rakuen--> "Starting ifplugd on eth0...OK, Bakcgrounding... , *WARNING: net.eth0 has started, but is inactive"
<rakuen--> Thev00d00 I don't understand the question
<Thev00d00> rakuen--: what lan chip have you got?
<Thev00d00> rakuen--: /etc/init.d/eth0 stop
<rakuen--> Thev00d00 I am not quite sure, ethernet something
<Thev00d00> rakuen--: ifconfig eth0 down
<Thev00d00> rakuen--: ifconfig eth0 up
<Thev00d00> rakuen--: dhclient eth0
<rakuen--> ended with: NO DHCP0FERS recieved. No working leases in persistent database - sleeping.
<Thev00d00> rakuen--: is it plugged in?
<rakuen--> no, I am using it to this computer (...) wait a moment
<Thev00d00> OMG
<Thev00d00> =0

Also I love people who say “pacific” instead of “specific”. Makes me fuzzy inside. I wonder if they realise.

The other day, the beta 2 disks were released to the testers team. Thanks to the wonderful feedback by the testers for beta 1, we were able to get a lot of things fixed. Fabio is back from his vacation and so it took him a bit to get through all the emails. There is still a few known issues and will hopefully get addressed in 5.0 RC1. We plan to move quickly with beta 2 to RC1 and hopefully than we will get a Final 5.0 in two weeks. No date for release set yet, but keep your eyes out for it in couple weeks. Beta two brought us kernel 2.6.31 and drivers, we also hit a delay due to the libxcb upgrade. This made for a lot of packages to be rebuilt. We’ve also updated the packages to latest in repo 5.

Joost has been working hard at keeping our package version updated with portage. We want to keep our users rolling with portage instead of getting hit with 800 package updates, but we’re still working on that idea. More information to come on that later. Right now we will try to keep up with portage and we even have one of our testers in training to help out with entropy maintaining, go Joseph!

I like the new artwork, a lot more tamer than the beta 1 artwork. KDE4 has really shaped up to be a really nice desktop. I still use awesome/gnome as primary, but I could easily switch to KDE4 and be very comfortable.

I should also mention that a core-cd will be released for 5.0. I don’t know the time frame for this yet, but my guess would be after the mini-dvds like usual. Responses from our core-cd are still rolling in and they are positive ones.

So anyway, watch for a final 5.0 in about 2 weeks.

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.