Planet Sabayon Linux

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve blogged, so I think its time I started doing it more regularly again. So what is going down in Sabayon HQ? Well there have been many interesting developments recently which I want to talk about.

Firstly we have the brand spanking new shiny Anaconda installer, this has been well publicised by wolfden and Lxnay and is really shaping up nicely, its about time the installer got an update and it is looking awesome, everyone has been testing (and breaking) the new installer and progress looks excellent. This is of course mainline Anaconda that is used in Fedora and RHEL et al and has inherited all the great features from it with some new sabayon specific stuff too, this version is more closely based on vanilla upstream git and as such we should inherit all the work that is being done upstream a lot faster.

Next up is nightly builds of sabayon, yes you read that correctly. The idea is that you will have one ISO on your hard disk which you will keep updated using rsync’s binary diff capabilities and the Sabayon rsync servers to only update the parts of the ISO that have changed, this is how we have been distributing ISOs to testers for a while now and is much quicker and easier than the old version using Xdelta. What has been done is that we have a scripted molecule install which creates a new ISO at 0200 UTC every night using the latest packages from the mainline repository, from these images the rysnc is updated and you can download the changes, simple but clever if you ask me.

Finally – recruitment. Getting people to work on an open source project is never easy, its not easy to find volunteers for anything in reality as time is such an expensive commodity. I have decided to step down from my position as artwork guy and as such Sabayon is looking for a replacement, if you have some design and theming skills, or even if you don’t why not get in contact with me and I’ll get you started.

You will need a good eye, ability to work in a team an interest in Sabayon and ability to use SVG, it would be preferred if you had some knowledge of bash scripts, ebuilds and linux theming, but we can train you if your designs are great. Once again, please do get in contact, either mail me, start a thread in the forums and show us your stuff or leave a comment even.

…and that’s all I can think of for now.

Well if ya haven’t heard by now that Fabio has been working/slaving away on a new installer I would have to ask where ya been?  Naw, seriously tho, we discussed at the first of the year about redoing  the current installer to provide a better installer.  I grabbed the beta version yesterday and thought I would give yas a peek at it.

So far so good!  I hope people will find the installer better and have lesser issues.  I myself never had problems with the old installer, but thanks to Fabio for making something even better.  Feel free to throw a few donation dollars his way while he is in-between jobs and still improving on your favorite distro.  He really is working hard for everyone and deserves to be shown some appreciation.

The Sabayon Linux CoreCD edition is a minimalistic release designed to provide a foundation for building a customized installation tailored to the users specific needs.

It’s smaller footprint allows for installation from a CD, and the CoreCD is also great for USB installations.

Features of Sabayon 5.2 CoreCD:
• Bootable Image suitable for a CD or USB thumb drive (~350MB-400MB)
• Text-Based installer
• Basic default networking
• Entropy and Portage ready (giving access to thousands of installable packages)
• Based on new GCC 4.4.1 and Glibc 2.10
• Shipped with Desktop-optimized Linux kernel 2.6.33
• Providing extra Server-optimized and OpenVZ-enabled kernels in repositories
• Quick installation

Minimum Requirements:
- an i686-compatible Processor (Intel Pentium II/III, Celeron, AMD Athlon)
- 512Mb RAM
- 2 GB of free space

The CoreCD release is targeted to advanced users who want to take full control of the features and packages installed on their system. Sabayon’s Entropy package manager can be utilized as soon as the CoreCD release is installed to quickly build out the installation based on the users exact requirements. The CoreCD also has the capability to install packages using the Portage package management system.

For more information, please see the “Visual Tour: CoreCD” on Sabayon’s Wiki.

Networking Notes: Advanced user skills may be necessary to implement networking on the CoreCD. The CoreCD can provide simple dhcp networking over wired networks by default. Most advanced networking configurations will require configuration by the user, possibly requiring “chroot-ing” into the CoreCD environment from another Linux environment with working networking.

Resources for Sabayon Linux CoreCD 5.2:
Kernel Configuration:
- Sabayon 5.2 x86 kernel config
- Sabayon 5.2 amd64 kernel config

Packages list:
- Sabayon Linux 5.2 CoreCD x86 Packages
- Sabayon Linux 5.2 CoreCD x86-64 (amd64) Packages

Download sources
Our Mirrors Page:
- http://www.sabayon.org/download
Bittorrent:
- http://tracker.sabayon.org/

I’m not a python developer myself at all, but I was just curious about the great codebase that Fabio wrote and documented.

Knowing I have the repository database on my hard disc I figured it should be simple to let it list the last 100 changed packages.

This is how its done:

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: iso-8859-1 -*-
from entropy.client.interfaces import Client
import time

client = Client()
repo = client.open_repository("sabayonlinux.org")
cur = repo._cursor().execute

for row in repo._cursor().execute('SELECT `extrainfo`.`datecreation`,`baseinfo`.`atom` FROM `baseinfo`,`extrainfo` WHERE `baseinfo`.`idpackage` = `extrainfo`.`idpackage` ORDER BY `extrainfo`.`datecreation` DESC LIMIT 100'):
	my_time = float(row[0])
	human_time = time.strftime("%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S +0000", time.localtime(my_time))
	print human_time,' ',row[1]

client.shutdown()

http://www.sabayon.org/entropy/api/docs/

If you want to know about the table layout, visually, you can use dev-db/sqlitebrowser

The database is located here:

/var/lib/entropy/client/database/x86/sabayonlinux.org/standard/x86/5/packages.db

or here

/var/lib/entropy/client/database/amd64/sabayonlinux.org/standard/amd64/5/packages.db

Beside my finances aren’t so good (hey reader, hire me!), I decided to dedicate this whole month to two main tasks;

1. Porting a new Anaconda (the RedHat installer) snapshot to Gentoo-land (and Sabayon in particular). After spending a whole week catching, one by one (and with the help of anaconda.spec.in) all the build, runtime dependencies the installer requires; and after having cooked every single missing ebuild in Portage to make the magic happen; and after having written (and ported from the old codebase) most of the backend code required to implement a “LiveCD” install, I can say I’m almost done. This time, I took the cleanest path possible in order to be able to keep our Anaconda port aligned with upstream.

You can find my git repo here, and gentoo-dev ML discussion (for reviewing and merging my ebuilds into the Portage tree). Maybe it’s time for Gentoo, to have a good LiveDVD installer?

2. Studies. My University studies are going well, this semester I’m digging into Computer Architecture, Functional Programming (using OCAML) and Java. Beside I always get bored when getting down to Java (maybe because I do like it too much? ), I find writing OCAML code really fun (and funny too?). So, my plans are, passing all these 3 exams in a row. Eheh…