Planet Sabayon Linux

A few posts back I posted about setting up your own spin. Things got moving quickly and we decided to overhaul the way we maintain our iso’s server-side.

Sabayon 5.4 will have everything based on the SpinBase iso and all applications on top off this will be placed in sets. A KDE set is going to be written soon.

A first result of the reorganization are the LXDE and XFCE spins released today!

Some important recent changes:

- On amd64 we moved to 32bits flash.
If you have a problem with it consider reinstalling nspluginwrapper. I know it is not the most elegant solution, but keeping users with a potential security risk was worse. And upstream Adobe did NOT provide a 64bits version.

- ATI-drivers 10.6 problems
Due a bug in the new ati-drivers that only affects people with a default xorg.conf (most off you) the light went out and X would die with a segfault. Check out this bug report on debian. As a result we decided to mask 10.6.

Sabayon Linux 5.3 “Extra Spins” releases

Our crew, is happy to announce the immediate availability of XFCE, LXDE and SpinBase/OpenVZ Sabayon 5.3 “Spins” built on top of Sabayon “SpinBase” ISO images.
Under the “Extra Spins” umbrella, the Sabayon developers are going to experiment new Stable Releases with different package compositions.
Consider these “Extra Spins” an appetizer of what you will get in the upcoming months: more “Spins” are planned and more external contributions will be accepted.
Just like the other regular Sabayon releases, these “Extra Spins” are also daily built by our Build Servers and available in our mirrors inside the “iso/daily” directory.

Features of Sabayon 5.3 XFCE Spin:
• Bootable Image suitable for a CD or USB thumb drive (<700Mb)
• Linux 2.6.34 Desktop kernel w/Tuxonice and AUFS support
• XFCE 4.6.2 Desktop Environment
• NetworkManager 0.8 as default networking tool
• Out of the box NTFS support via NTFS-3G
• Mozilla Firefox 3.6.6
• Basic VirtualBox Guest integration
• Very fast installation via our Live Anaconda Installer (which gained stability improvements and several new minor features)
• Very minimal setup to fit into a CD, no fancy features and drivers. Designed for low-end computers.
• Package list: amd64
• Package list: x86

Features of Sabayon 5.3 LXDE Spin:
• Bootable Image suitable for a CD or USB thumb drive (<700Mb)
• Linux 2.6.34 Desktop kernel w/Tuxonice and AUFS support
• LXDE 0.5.0 Desktop Environment
• NetworkManager 0.8 as default networking tool
• Out of the box NTFS support via NTFS-3G
• Mozilla Firefox 3.6.6
• Basic VirtualBox Guest integration
• Very fast installation via our Live Anaconda Installer (which gained stability improvements and several new minor features)
• Very minimal setup to fit into a CD, no fancy features and drivers. Designed for low-end computers (and Windows-addicted users).
• Package list: amd64
• Package list: x86

Features of Sabayon 5.3 SpinBase/OpenVZ templates:
• To be used with OpenVZ servers (or Sabayon OpenVZ installations with sys-kernel/linux-openvz kernel)
• Very small footprint, yet providing a full feature OpenVZ guest Virtual Machine
• OpenVZ template installation howto available at planet.sabayon.org
• Package list: amd64
• Package list: x86

Download sources
Our Mirrors Page:
Just choose a link from the list and get to the “iso” directory
- http://www.sabayon.org/download
Bittorrent:
- http://tracker.sabayon.org

MD5 hashes of released files
71923122a703af647cf9128356edf103 Sabayon_Linux_5.3_amd64_LXDE.iso
dba2212e09764186ab56c74fdeb70922 Sabayon_Linux_5.3_x86_LXDE.iso
66c54177b3c26226689b571bb6eb9aa2 Sabayon_Linux_5.3_amd64_XFCE.iso
ec605701b7cbd24c07c82d956377be3e Sabayon_Linux_5.3_x86_XFCE.iso
ee2b3e08ab98e99713df9fa0c2f0fad3 Sabayon_Linux_SpinBase_5.3_amd64_openvz.tar.gz
aec80516bf2992d70960e337842eb8ec Sabayon_Linux_SpinBase_5.3_x86_openvz.tar.gz

Sabayon OpenVZ templates are being added to our build server and will be generated nightly based on DAILY SpinBase ISO images.

But what is OpenVZ?

“In short, OpenVZ is the only highly scalable virtualization technology with near-zero overhead, strong isolation and rapid customer provisioning that’s ready for production use right now. Deployment of OpenVZ improves efficiency, flexibility and quality of service in the enterprise environment.” [from: http://wiki.openvz.org/FAQ]

How does it work?

How do I install all the fancy stuff on Sabayon?

equo install sys-kernel/linux-openvz vzctl vzquota vzdump
rc-update add vz default

You may want to turn NetworkManager off and switch to plain /etc/conf.d/net configuration (replace net.eth0 with your NIC id)

rc-update del NetworkManager default && rc-update add net.eth0 default
nano -w /etc/sysctl.conf # and set net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
reboot

Remove the Sabayon standard kernel and drop all the proprietary/external_driver stuff

equo remove sys-kernel/linux-sabayon

OpenVZ will read configuration defaults from /etc/vz/conf/*-sample files [ve-light.conf.sample, ve-unlimited.conf-sample, ve-vps.basic.conf-sample], make sure to edit the desired file and tweak DISKSPACE and DISKINODES parameters to make your Sabayon OpenVZ template to fit (I advice to set DISKSPACE to at least 4194304:4612096 and DISKINODES to 800000:880000).
Now download, for example, the amd64 OpenVZ template from our mirrors: Sabayon_Linux_SpinBase_DAILY_amd64_openvz.tar.gz and place it into /vz/template/cache.
Now you’re ready to install the template!

vzctl create 101 --ostemplate Sabayon_Linux_SpinBase_DAILY_amd64_openvz \
  --config vps.basic

NOTE: 101 is the so called “veid” that will be used to identify your virtual machine (it’s a virtual machine ID). You can omit the –config parameter or set it to “unlimited” (for unlimited virtual machine resources) or to “light“.  But really make sure that the disk quota assigned to the veid is enough to make the .tar.gz content to fit.

You’re done! Just start the virtual machine with: “vzctl start 101” and enter it with “vzctl enter 101“. The newly created virtual machine will start at boot. If you want to change its settings (adding more RAM or disk space), you can either use “vzctl” or edit /etc/vz/conf/101.conf.

Have fun!

A quick little guide on helping and getting involved with the future releases of Sabayon.  I know and see people asking what they can do to be more involved in Sabayon.  If you have some experience, time and capabilities, you can help test the weekly iso images or add the entropy limbo repository and test packages.  I wouldn’t recommend this for or on your production system.  You can and will run into broken stuff, but that is the fun in testing!  I like to use rsync as it saves on bandwidth of having to re-download the entire ISO.  With rsync you only download the changes.  So how does one do this you may ask.  It’s pretty easy, find a mirror on our download page that supports rsync.

Let’s for example use Italy – Garr mirror.  You will notice rsync://na.mirror.garr.it/sabayonlinux [1000Mbit/sec].

This is what you are looking for.  I myself have created in my home directory two directory structures /home/wolfden/isos/x86 and /home/wolfden/isos/64.  You have the option to rsync the entire directory which will grab all the iso images from the server.  I do not want to do that.  I only want the 64 bit ones as that is all I use.  So I rsync the Gnome and KDE editions of the x86_64 isos.  You will have to decide what you want to do.  Either do all or pick the one(s) you want.

Now I just need to run a simple command via terminal:

rsync –progress -av rsync://na.mirror.garr.it/sabayonlinux/iso/daily/Sabayon_Linux_DAILY_x86_G.iso /home/wolfden/isos/x86  (it’s a double dash in front of progress)

That will go out and fetch the iso file and place it into the directory.  I always grab the md5 file also and check the iso image.  Just like this:

rsync –progress -av rsync://na.mirror.garr.it/sabayonlinux/iso/daily/Sabayon_Linux_DAILY_x86_G.md5 /home/wolfden/isos/x86

than to verify

md5sum -c Sabayon_Linux_DAILY__x86_G.iso

Now that you have the file, in the future when you run the above commands, it will update your iso and md5 by downloading only the changes instead of the entire iso file again.  You can of course download your first iso(s) off the ftp side of the server and move it to the correct directory and than run the rsync.  As long as the iso and path all point correctly it will update.

If you want to download all the isos, you can simple do something like:

rsync –progress -av rsync://na.mirror.garr.it/sabayonlinux/iso/daily/Sabayon_Linux_DAILY_x86_G.iso /home/wolfden/isos

That will grab everything in the directory.  To get a directory listing:

rsync –list-only rsync://na.mirror.garr.it/sabayonlinux/iso/daily/

I like to use unetbootin and a flash drive for testing iso.  Save a blank cd/dvd-r and use a flash drive if you can.

Maybe you don’t want to test iso(s) and just want to test packages.  We have the entropy limbo repository that is the testing ground for packages before they get moved into the main line repository. One of the entropy team members will give a shout out here and there for specific testing of limbo packages even.  You can enable the limbo repository through sulfur or by editing the /etc/entropy/repositories.conf, please see our wiki for that.  Also make sure you are on the Sabayon Dev Mailing List to stay in touch with announcements and changes for testing.  Getting on the Dev ML should be your first step.

So now you are testing and find an issue or bug and need to report it.  You can use the Sabayon Dev ML, Sabayon Bugzilla or discuss testing in the special forum section devoted to just testing. When reporting, try to keep in mind a few important things that are needed:

• Which Sabayon Linux are you running – x86, x86_64, gnome, kde, core ?
• How to reproduce the issue? Give us the steps on what you did to get the issue(s) so we can try and reproduce it.
• Any and All Log files that pertain to the issue.
• Hardware List

The more information you submit, the easier it is for us and there is no cat and mouse chasing to get the required information.  Stating that the latest entropy limbo update crashed your desktop isn’t what we want to see.  Reports like that are usually deleted as they are useless.  So try and remember that the more information you can give, the better.  Someone will usually try and recreate the issue to confirm or deny the issue.  Feel free to confirm or deny the issue(s) as they are posted.

Being a tester is usually for experienced users and you usually don’t want to run it as your main operating system.  Some ask that they don’t have enough hard drive space to test and want to know if they can use Virtual Box.  Yes you can.  We need all aspects tested.  This includes things like virtualization, running it in live mode, and doing actual installs.  New users are gonna get their first impression from the Live mode, so we need that working flawlessly.  I like to use unetbootin for this.  Just let us know how you are running it, again, the more information you can provide, the better.  Test anyway you can and help make a stronger Sabayon and be apart of that.

Thanks to all that do already and will be in the future.

Recently I seem to have been neglecting my blog a bit, I will try to keep it more regularly updated from now on.

The next Sabayon Linux release will be 5.4 as usual it will have the usual skew of package updates and bug fixes. We are tracking the bugs earmarked for fixing before 5.4 using the Sabayon 5.4 Tracking Bug. This means that you can see which bugs will be fixed for 5.4 and the status of each issue individually; it also means you can report bugs and we can easily target those before each release. This is a new public approach for to nailing down issues before release and is due in part to structural changes within the Sabayon testers group.

Previously the Sabayon testers team (who are one of Sabayon’s most valuable assets) had a closed mailing list and IRC channel, as of this week both of these are being closed and all activity will be moved over to the existing public infrastructure of the Sabayon-dev mailing list and #Sabayon-dev IRC channel on freenode. The ‘opening up’ of the process was done to improve communication with the wider community, ideally it will  get some more testers involved in testing and encourage more widespread input on the varying aspects of the the distribution. If you want to get involved, just grab one of the Sabayon daily images and hop on the devel mailing list with any issues.

I have decided to pick my artwork duties back up for 5.4 (as no else has volunteered to do art!) which means I can also reveal some things regarding the theme for 5.4. Firstly there will be a new theme which shares a colour scheme with the current 5.x theme, hooray! Secondly, the Sabayon “hens foot” logo will be brought back as the official Sabayon logo! Woot! There will also be a brand new KDM theme and wider KDE will be getting some theming love too.

In conclusion then, there is a lot to look forward to in Sabayon Linux 5.4, stay tuned for more information.

I can’t think of a better way to learn something new by playing. Since the “spin era” has begun with Sabayon Linux by using molecule, it’s something new to learn. Joost has posted a quick run down of how to do a basic spin.   I’ve been messing around with this molecule thing and have found that adding and subtracting packages is simple enough to do.  I do find that specific customizations of the user and root accounts a bit more complicated.  I’m still trying to figure that one out yet.  Scripting isn’t my strong point at all.  I understand what it needs to do, but assembling a script of commands and paths is like writing hieroglyphics.  I’m not sure where the script should be placed at in my spec file nor when the script should be invoked.

I didn’t have much interest in doing a spin till I realized that a couple of things in my own personal life stuck out to me.  The biggest thing was my constantly working and fixing on people’s windows machines that are constantly plagued with viruses and malware.   The idea than came up to make a spin specific to fixing and repairing windows machines.  I already knew that Sabayon boots up and works on many machines with no problems, which makes it great for such a job of booting windows machines that don’t.  I made my first spin and that same week I had 3 machines come in with problems.  I tossed in my spin, did the fixes, and got the machines back to a sane state again.  It’s very effective and saves me time.  I now carry it around on a usb stick and it’s with me at all times.  I learned a lot in the process and now with the structure in place, it’s easy for me to update my original spin with latest entropy.

I was talking with our local Chief of Police who is also on the task force for Child Pornography and discovered that at the last training class they were using old Knoppix disks to access a suspected computer.  I was surprised to see how limited they were and decided to take my spin a bit further and add some more stuff.  This is when my spin turned into a Sabayon Forensics spin.  I collected a list of packages that would be most useful and fairly easily for any law enforcement official to use.  Keep in mind that it’s for using at the local level to determine if a suspected computer needs to go into the crime lab.  It has the abilities to boot, fix, crack, search, upload, and transfer files easily on any computer.  I am using the gnome x86 for my base and plan on doing an x86 KDE one also.  My last issue to figure out is how to switch out the default background of the desktop.  I want to leave all the other artwork in place, just switch out the desktop background.   Once I figure this out, I plan to present this and maybe Sabayon can become a part of fighting crime.  If not adopted at the state level, it still will be used at the local level. This is my goal upon boot up:

One last thing before I sign off.  Last week we lost one of our staff members in an accident. He was laid  to rest on July 3rd and will be missed.  He is still in our thoughts and prayers to family and friends.  One of our staff members was able to attend the funeral and we sent flowers from the Sabayon crew.

(this post was made by Mitch Harder on the development mailing list)

I want to bring everybody up to speed on some name shuffling we are
doing with our “Core” releases.

CoreCDX is now our primary public “Core” release. Users who want to
install a minimal Sabayon Linux version should use this version with
the graphical installer.

The CoreCD has been renamed “SpinBase”. It’s primary purpose is to be
our internal “Base” for building up automated “Spin” releases. It
will be publicly available to anyone who wants it (primarily
developers and molecule users), but will not be advertised as a
“release”.

The upstream maintainers of Anaconda have drastically cut back the
functionality of the Anaconda installer with respect to console-based
text installation.

The graphical installer is working great, and has updated some
capabilities to handle new hardware. But the console-based text
installer has lost the ability to custom partition an installation,
and is primarily directed at installing to an empty disk. Inattentive
users who are used to the previous text-based installer run the hazard
of overwriting their entire hard disk.

During this release cycle, we’ve been struggling with how to handle
this change in our installer. We’ve developed CoreCDX as a release
intended for end users who want a minimal Sabayon Linux system with a
robust, easy-to-use installer.

The CoreCD is still extremely important to Sabayon as we evolve our
“Spin” releases. But it has become of marginal value to end users due
to the limitations of the text-based installer. And, the text-based
installer as it exists now will confuse users and perhaps lead to lose
of data for those expecting it to function like previous releases.

So we have renamed the “CoreCD” to “SpinBase” since the name was too
close to CoreCDX, and would lead to confusion. As previously noted,
it will be publicly available, but not promoted as a “release”.

So, to summarize:
(1) CoreCDX is our new ‘minimal’ release for users who want a
stripped down Sabayon installation.
(2) SpinBase is a release primarily directed at developers who want
to use molecule, and also an important internal release.

As you might know, Youtube has a time limit for movies. They only allow a max. duration of 10 minutes each movie you upload. There is also a 100MB limit foreach movie but that wasn’t my problem here.

After some searching I found out that it’s pretty simple doing this with Sabayon Linux without installing any additional packages.
Given my movie (full_movie.avi) is a length off 00:18:49 I would need to split this.

create the first part:
mencoder -endpos 00:10:00 -ovc copy -oac copy test-001.avi -o part_1.avi
create the second part that starts at 00:10:00
mencoder -ss 00:10:00 -endpos 00:20:00 -ovc copy -oac copy test-001.avi -o part_2.avi
From here you can obviously continue until you split up the entire movie.

and there you have it.

joost@xbox-360 ~/dvdrip-data/test/avi/001 $ ls -lh
total 152M
-rw-r–r– 1 joost users 77M May 21 19:59 full_movie.avi
-rw-r–r– 1 joost users 41M Jun 9 13:50 part_1.avi
-rw-r–r– 1 joost users 36M Jun 9 13:51 part_2.avi

Incase you fell asleep, Sabayon 5.3 was release last week.  My internet died for a while so I didn’t get much testing in on the final leg.  I’ve also been busy playin with molecule for my own adventure.  Enjoy!

The best, refined blend of GNU/Linux, coming with bleeding edge edges is eventually here! Say hello to Sabayon Five-point-Threeh, available in both GNOME and KDE editions!

Dedicated to those who like cutting edge stability, out of the box experience, outstanding Desktop performance, clean and beauty. Sabayon 5.3 will catch you, anything that could have been compiled, has been compiled, anything cool that could have been implemented or updated, it’s there: you will find outstanding amount of new applications and features, like XBMC, KDE 4.4, GNOME 2.28, Linux Kernel 2.6.34, and so forth.
So, come on, go catch it, it’s half a DVD away from you!

Visual Tours:
• Take a Tour – Booting (GNOME)
• Take a Tour – Installer (GNOME)
• Take a Tour – Booting (KDE)
• Take a Tour – Installer (KDE)

Features of Sabayon 5.3:
• Based on new GCC 4.4 and Glibc 2.10
• Shipped with Desktop-optimized Linux kernel 2.6.34
• Providing extra Server-optimized and OpenVZ-enabled kernels in repositories
• Installable in 10 minutes
• Fast boot time and lightweight default system
• Ext4 filesystem as default
• Official Btrfs filesystem support
• Encrypted filesystem support
• Featuring X.Org 7.5 and up-to-date, NVIDIA, AMD video drivers
• Containing GNOME 2.28 (with GNOME Shell!) and KDE 4.4.3
• Outstanding 3D Desktop applications (Compiz, Compiz Fusion and KWin) working out of the box
• Bringing Entropy Framework (Package Manager) 0.99.46.9
• Shipped with OpenOffice 3.2 productivity suite, Multimedia applications
• Transform Sabayon into an full-featured HTPC Operating System (Media Center) using XBMC
• Shipped with World of Goo Demo – best 2D game ever!
• Sexiest Skin ever! (Light blueeee!)
• Try it out from Windows, just kick the DVD in and use Sabayon via QEMU virtualization!
• Ready for Sabayon 6 (someday!)

Updates since Sabayon 5.2:
• New Linux Kernel 2.6.34 with enhanced wireless and power management support
• New Installer! Based on Fedora14 Anaconda, with improved LVM, RAID, Encryption, Filesystem support
• Optional language-pack download via Installer
• Improved GRUB2 support
• Improved VirtualBox input/video drivers support (based on 3.2.x branch)
• KDE updated to 4.4.3
• GNOME ready for 2.30 (will be available via updates)
• Entropy Framework (our binary package manager) updated to 0.99.46.9, featuring stability and performance improvements (especially in Sulfur)
• Providing PackageKit library and CLI support (version 0.6.5, kpackagekit and gnome-packagekit available in our repositories)
• More than 1000 new updated packages available (since Sabayon 5.2)
• Reduced ISO images footprint by 150Mb
• Improved XBMC, Media Center installation profile support and reliability (fixing several segfaults)
• Improved keyboard mappings autoconfiguration
• Password for root account is blank, so just hit enter when asks for root password

Requirements
Minimum requirements:
- an i686-compatible Processor (Intel Pentium II/III, Celeron, AMD Athlon)
- 512Mb RAM (GNOME) – 768Mb RAM (KDE)
- 8 GB of free space
- A X.Org supported 2D GPU
- a DVD reader
Optimal requirements:
- a Dual Core Processor (Intel Core 2 Duo or better, AMD Athlon 64 X2 or better)
- 1024Mb RAM
- 15 GB of free space
- A X.Org supported 3D GPU (Intel, AMD, NVIDIA) (esp. for XBMC)

Resources for Sabayon Linux 5.3 GNOME and KDE:
Kernel Configuration:
- Sabayon 5.3 x86 kernel config
- Sabayon 5.3 amd64 kernel config
Packages list:
- Sabayon Linux x86 5.3 KDE Packages
- Sabayon Linux x86-64 5.3 KDE Packages
- Sabayon Linux x86 5.3 GNOME Packages
- Sabayon Linux x86-64 5.3 GNOME Packages

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

Thanks everybody for having made this possible!

Here is a quick checklist of things you can try.

I still have grub 0.xx how can I use grub2?
If you are using an older Sabayon install like 5.1 or earlier, grub might have been updated as a package, but it still would not be installed to the master boot record. You will have todo that manually if you want to switch over to grub2!

grub2-install /dev/sda

Will install the newer grub to the MBR, from here you need to generate the /boot/grub/grub.cfg
MIND THIS: grub2 does NOT use /boot/grub/menu.lst or /boot/grub/grub.conf anymore!!

To generate your new cfg file as root issue this command:

grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

I have grub2 but it does not work from my external USB drive!
If you use grub2 from your USB MBR you want to add these flags to the kernel line in /boot/grub/grub.cfg
doslowusb scandelay=10

or even better would be to add them here:
/etc/default/grub
in GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”"
and then regenerate you grub.cfg (grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg)

reason this is better is because whenever entropy automatically triggers the grub config rebuild script your direct edit on /boot/grub/grub.cfg will be lost.

I have grub2 and it boots fine , but my bootsplash image is corrupted!
Add this to your kernel boot line:
vga=791

Hope it helps.