KDE 4.4 Sabayon 5.2 beta
The questions are flowing in and people are getting excited about seeing blue. Yes, the 5.2 artwork is getting around and people are noticing. Of course, if you have been using limbo repository you would of been blue for quite some time now. That Ian sure can make some magic happen with the artwork. I don’t think it’s fully completed yet, so if you notice something not right, hang on, it’s a coming. So when do we plan to release this 5.2 beast is the big question burning in the minds. Right now, everything is pointing to end of March for a final 5.2 release. The testers group just got the beta isos the other day and are underway of testing and reporting. It didn’t even have the new artwork packages when it was released so it’s looking pretty identical to 5.1 at the moment. So what are the changes thus far?
- – In sync with latest repository updates
- – Several Installer fixes (see gitweb)
- – Grub2 support (enabled by default)
- – Removed several unused packages to make ISO images slimmer
- – Ability to live-check installer fixes (if issues arise) by just spawning “cd /opt/anaconda && git pull”
- – Improved boot speed (thanks to latest OpenRC)
- – 2.6.32 kernel by default
Other business, pulseaudio, yes that beloved thing that we are all cussing and beating under the rug. Tonight, Fabio, Joost and I poked fun at pulseaudio, threatened to remove it, tried several different things and we came to a conclusion that on amd64 the flash is buggy. It doesn’t work with hulu at the moment. I even saw on sabayon forum of other sites not working on the amd64 platform. For me, pulse seems to work with everything, but flash + pulse applications. This is the only trouble I have ran into. To get around most of this issue, I have set application preferences to use alsa and I’m using hulu desktop, which is in our entropy. You can kill pulseaudio totally with the mv /usr/bin/pulseaudio /usr/bin/pulseaudio.old and than restart. How you handle it, it’s up to you, but either way, flash and pulseaudio fixes has to come from upstream, so we wait. No decisions have been made as of yet for pulseaudio. Do not look for it to go away just yet.
This is a personal thanks to Fabio as this was my request. I never liked the progress status on the tab of Sulfur as it never made me feel 100% sure it was done and all was good. So now it says Tasks completed successfully when it’s done! No more wondering if it’s safe to close Sulfur. Thanks Fabio!
Sulfur
We want to start a new fund-raiser and this is an important one I feel. You all remember the mirror issues we had a couple weeks ago right? We want to prevent that in the future and we need the help of our users. Financial funds have already been put in place directly from the pockets of a few sabayon core members to help with this. Lets help them back so they don’t have to take the full blow of these extra costs. Some other costs we are running into is spreading the word. We have members hitting the Linux events and putting on displays and handing out disks to new people. They are donating the time, but it still costs money to spread the word. All donations go directly into the project to give more back to the world. Thank you to each and every one of you that take the time to send in a few dollars.
Anyway, we will keep you up on the latest 5.2 happenings. Remember now, 5.2 and the end of March is what we are looking at. If you are doing your equo update && equo world, you are current and rolling along, so no worries for you.
Oh, please do make sure that you keep your entropy to latest version before anything. Anyone doing a fresh install or upgrade, please do equo update && equo install entropy equo sulfur –nodeps && equo upgrade. It’s vital to have latest entropy version.
