A sad day for the community

Dear friends,

Today we've learned that our friend mr. Bunz died.
Our thoughts are with his family and friends.

The man with the balloons that always made us smile is no more.

http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/112-10212008-1608461.html%27

The road to Sabayon 4.0

Our team is growing stronger and everybody is working hard to get things in shape. I think its like 2 months ago that we decided to write down an organisation structure in wich everybody invloved gets a place and its tasks.

We needed to make this step to get things done faster and work more efficient on the project.
A real important position in this all would be the desktop users voice. It was obvious to ask Kelly Schwartz (wolfden) to take this position (CCO - Chief Community Officer) and he accepted it.

Our CCO knows whats going on in the community, problems people run into and also things people would like in the distro or don't. Our CCO now has a direct voice under Fabio and this means our intentions are to really make this distro suit perfect for our community.

Besides the CCO allot of positions are taken and some new people hooked up to the project, wich is great, but we still need more people on our development team. So if you think you can offer help in means of Bash/Python scripting or can help on the ebuilds in our overlay please contact us.

While i'm allready working on the 4.0 branch you might know that an interim release is planned. Sabayon 3.5.1 will be released soon and will diff 400+ package updates since sabayon 3.5 released. Also some other patches are applied to it.

So about 4.0, what can you expect?

KDE 4.1.2
Gnome 2.24
latest xorg (hopefully the AMD/ATI driver will be ready for it soon)
and allot more.

We also changed the chost on the 32bits version. So it will be i686. This means that each package needed to be recompiled and thus gets a revision in Entropy. In short this means that by the time you want to upgrade to 4.0 using Entropy, each package will be updated. On the amd64 4.0 branch this will not be necessary.

CrossOver Chromium

In addition to my previous post, my friend from Brasil pointed out that Codeweavers created a more elegant way to play with Google Chrome.

http://media.codeweavers.com/pub/crossover/chromium/install-cxchromium-0.9.0.sh

Enjoy!

Google chrome under Wine

While it still is beta, like anything from Google, it is possible to run Google chrome on Sabayon.

We need to download the installer first:
http://gpdl.google.com/chrome/install/149.29/chrome_installer.exe

Click to install it and notice that a desktop icon for Chrome is created. Now open up a terminal and edit this file.

nano Google\ Chrome.desktop

Edit the line so it looks like this:

Exec[$e]=env WINEPREFIX="/home/joost/.wine" wine "C:\\windows\\profiles\\joost\\Local Settings\\Application Data\\Google\\Chrome\\Application\\chrome.exe" --new-http --in-process-plugins

As you can see i've added --new-http --in-process-plugins to that line (outside the quotes).

Now fire op Chrome from your desktop icon.
I noticed that on KDE the top panel overlaps, so might wanna drag it away to the side.

Happy hacking!



Source: http://www.myscienceisbetter.info/2008/09/install-google-chrome-on-linux-using-wine.html

Where is KDE 4.1?

Archlinux has it, Fedora has it, but where is KDE 4.1 on Sabayon Linux?

As you know Sabayon Linux depends on Gentoo portage. We use it as our backbone.
Portage is a robust package manager and everything in there is pre-tested by its maintainer.

Now portage has its categories with its own developers that create ebuilds and patches. So there are teams on several projects like gnome, xorg, java, etc etc.

Now from my understanding the KDE team has shrunk desperately lately because they reorganized the team. I won't go in detail about that, but the timing is a bit nasty sadly.

If you are curious about the progress being made, have a look here http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/kde.git;a=shortlog

Only thing i can say about the few people working on it, respect!

As soon KDE 4.1 is done and hits portage, Sabayon Linux will merge it in the 3.5 branch. So you will not have to wait for a next Sabayon version at all.

Another thing i wanted to share with you is NFS.
If you have NFS shares in your fstab and you want them to be mounted after boot, this somehow doesn't work on Sabayon. For some Reason the order, depend at boot time isn't right for this setup. A rather simple fix solves that though.

Edit your /etc/init.d/nfs and add sleep 10 to it. This makes it wait 10 seconds (so Networkmanager should be done with whatever its doing).

A dirty but effective fix.

snipet:

#!/sbin/runscript
# Copyright 1999-2007 Gentoo Foundation
# Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2
# $Header: /var/cvsroot/gentoo-x86/net-fs/nfs-utils/files/nfs.initd,v 1.12 2008/04/20 00:52:24 vapier Exp $

opts="reload"

# This variable is used for controlling whether or not to run exportfs -ua;
# see stop() for more information
restarting=no

# The binary locations
exportfs=/usr/sbin/exportfs
mountd=/usr/sbin/rpc.mountd
 nfsd=/usr/sbin/rpc.nfsd
smnotify=/usr/sbin/sm-notify

sleep 10

depend() {
local myneed=""
if [ -e /etc/exports ] ; then
if awk '!/^[[:space:]]*#/ && $2 ~ /sec=/ { exit 0 } END { exit 1 }' /etc/exports ; then
 myneed="${myneed} rpc.svcgssd"
fi
fi
type -t config 2>/dev/null 1>&2 && config /etc/exports
need portmap rpc.statd ${myneed}
use ypbind net dns rpc.rquotad rpc.idmapd rpc.svcgssd
after quota
}

.... etc etc....

Relaxing in Amsterdam

After a bussy and confusing week i was glad this Amsterdam weekend trip was planned.

I had a quick meeting with Armin Wintasunn we had some coffee at the Spui. I admire the guy as he really creates art on the web. proof

Since i mostly meet new people on the internet and meet them in person later, it's always a funny thing when you sit and wait in a very crowded city waiting not nowing how someone you kinda know good enough looks like. So this meeting started funny when Armin phoned me standing just 1 meter next to me.

After quick decissions made about a project we might do, we seperated paths.

Spend the afternoon in the Vondel Park with my wife and kids. Its a nice place to chill out a bit. An oase of rest in a world city.

Oooh incase you missed it, yesterday the CD version of Sabayon linux got released. Under the codename "Pod" you'll have a nice small and elegant XFCE desktop. check it out

The road to 3.5 in a nutshell

So where do i start?

Right after Sabayon Linux 3.4F mini released I completely focused on entropy.

I spend evenings testing equo, reporting back to Fabio. At some point I've reinstalled 3.4f like 12 times to test the upgrade procedure to Sabayon Linux 3.5 Loop 1 using only equo as a tool.
That was dirty but important work and now its all paying off!

Equo stabilised and we could start thinking about a GUI. Forking off Yum Extender Spritz was born. Meanwhile i worked on growing our repositories and slowly things started to grow and grow.

The project site was moved to a Level3 server in Amsterdam. Better server, greater bandwith, better deal. Actually it was cheaper so there wasn't much to think about.

We knew we needed to upscale our server capabilities and certainly needed the bandwith to be able to serve up our fresh repositories. We needed money.

I've contacted the people at nllgg.nl and they helped us out great. We quickly got a full mirror and nluug.nl thanks to them and applied for funds we needed at nlnet.nl. We were more then excited to hear we got chosen after some pre-sellection. With the funds we had allot less to worry about and really could focus on the plan Fabio created.

Meanwhile more and more people started hooking up to the project. Beta testers, translators and developers. Its great to see how it all comes togheter now.

Big thanks to everybody involved.