Branch 5: A work in progress

About 3 weeks ago i started work on branch 5 for Sabayon 5 and i must say that i made good progress! So i hear you ask, what it means a "branch" well let me try to explain how it all works.

Branches...chroots..snapshots?

The chroots:

As you might already know, Sabayon Linux is based on Gentoo Linux.
Now in Italy we have this huge computer that hosts basically 2 enormous Gentoo installs, we call these "chroots". It's 2 chroots because we support 2 architectures amd64 and x86. So as you might guessed, yes all packaging that goes into entropy is done twice. These 2 chroots form one branch.

How i do it? Well I simply login the Italian server and connect to one of the chroots. When I log in to a chroot ( yes its the chroot command, but we saved them in screen sessions to get access to them quickly ) I use all the commands any Gentoo user would. I operate my make.conf, package.use and package.mask files to have my enormous tree compiled to be best performing for a great amount of machines and people. Day to day i check for relevant packages that we want to have updated in e.g. Entropy. When i'm done emerging those updates and their depends i use tools written by Fabio Erculiani aka "Lxnay" to create packages. This is done fully automatically and there is nothing difficult about that really. So once its all packaged and i did my quality checks its all ready to get pushed out to the people as I say. From the server in Italy things get uploaded to the distribution server from where everything, again automatically, gets spread to servers world wide. Pretty cool huh?

Branches :

So we have these chroots I'm working on day 2 day and at a certain point there are some important updates that require allot of packages to be recompiled. Think of a new python version, new xorg version and some other lower-level stuff like the compiler itself.
At some point it just makes sense to stop doing the day 2 day updates, copy the whole thing and from the copy do the important updates and the heavy recompiling. This new copy would be the new branch. Does it mean that the previous branch is closed? Well basicly from my side it is, i only do updates on it when there are security risks involved, we are Linux and we want to keep people safe. The goal is to keep the old branch available to users for at least a year. This will give them the time to migrate to the new branch. (By either installing a new DVD release or use equo hop to jump into the new branch.) So yeah, its possible to keep on working on the same system and just hop into the new branch.

Snapshots:

When a new branch is created and the first disc is released there are already newer updates almost everyday. At some point it would be enough to trigger like 300 updates after a new install on a users pc. This can be even within 6 weeks or so. At some point we create a new snapshot which is basically as much as : Take Release 1, equo upgrade it to the latest available packages, put is all on a disc.

So yeah, we are a true rolling distribution!

Blogging from the Linux desktop

Now that Gnome 2.26 is finally in Entropy i was looking at some stuff to highlight a bit.

Incase you missed it, Spritz got renamed to Sulfur this week. If you haven't allready installed it yet, check it out! The idea behind it was to by default offer a less complex interface for the comfort of lesser experienced people out there. You can simply switch to the older interface with all the options by selecting the "Advanced Mode" from the Sulfur top menu.

One of the recent added programs to portage is "Choqok" I nice micro-blogging application thats well designed in Qt4. It has inituative tabs and lets you, on Twitter, Re-Tweet Favorite and reply easily.

Another nice application for the more intense blogging work i've found got very recently added to Portage. Bilbo Blogger.

This program offers you a rich text editor to write your blog and depending on the API that the blogsite provides, it even lets you add images easily. Setting up the account is done by simply dumping in the link to your blog and your credentials.

Meanwhile i can tell you that we are on schedule for the next comming Sabayon Linux G 4.2 release. If you allready have Sabayon 4 and keep it up2date using Entropy, there will be no need to install it. All the artwork related to it is rolling in Entropy as we speak. So when you are Entropy world updated a 4.2 will be visable when you startup your machine.

Last but not least, I came across a nice video about why Linux sucks. Check it out because its all true! (ok most of it)

E17 now available in Entropy

To get it installed do this:

as root in a terminal:
equo update

then

edit /etc/entropy/packages/package.unmask
add into this file:

dev-libs/eina
dev-libs/eet
x11-libs/evas
x11-libs/ecore
dev-libs/embryo
media-libs/edje
dev-libs/efreet
x11-libs/e_dbus
x11-wm/enlightenment

then

equo install dev-libs/eina dev-libs/eet x11-libs/evas x11-libs/ecore dev-libs/embryo media-libs/edje dev-libs/efreet x11-libs/e_dbus x11-wm/enlightenment

Now e17 is installed and you can enjoy it by selecting "enlightenment" from the sessions menu in the login screen.

additional tips:

Download themes here!

Goodluck Fabio and Welcome Daniel

After some years of hard work Fabio Erculiani decided it was enough and he wants to move on.

The team regrets this ofcourse and we wish him all the good luck with his new job @Microsoft

Would this mean the end of Sabayon? No! ofcourse not.
We have Daniel Robbins and some gentoo-devs ready to come help the distro to make it even better.

A press update will follow shortly

Some additions to KDE4

We are working on the next Sabayon 4.1 release and things are going well.

As you might know, this time we want to do things slightly different. Ironicly we always do things different. But this time we decided to work on 2 different DVD's based on the previous succesfull release of liteMCE.

The G disc:

This will be allot like the liteMCE disc which features gnome as its desktopmanger.

The G disc doesn't need much work. Since its mostly an updated packages/artwork version of liteMCE.

The K disc:

This would be the same thing as the G disc but with KDE 4.2.1 as its desktopmanager.

Now this one will take more time because we want to tackle some practical problems. We want to ship the K with the most pure KDE/Qt programs and we need to work out some of the artwork issues like GTK applications (e.g. firefox) that are looking ugly.

So i went looking and found a nice replacement for Gparted:

http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php/KDE+Partition+Manager?content=89595

This package is already available in entropy. Please note that its still marked as beta and on my system it took a while before it loaded up on my screen.

Another thing we wanted to add to the K disc is a nice little program that lets you edit the grub menu and even reinstall grub in case of an emergency.

The GRUB editor program is now in entropy.

http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php/KGRUBEditor?content=75442

Any further suggestions are welcome.

Entropy UGC

Ever since we launched the new website and implemented UGC (User Generated Content) in entropy it looks like it never came clear what this is all about. Let me try to put some light in the dark here and explain about the purpose about it.

We wanted to combine web 2.0 functionality with our packagemanager.
A user should be able to login into spritz and rate a package and further more, add some media to it so other users can see this using either spritz or directly from the web.

So what lxnay did was translate the phpbb functions into our own python api that would make interaction between forum and entropy UGC possible.

You might not have noticed it yet, but if you double click on a package in spritz this will open a new dialog presenting some more details about this package. How its build and when and more details you might never need to know.




Simply click on + add document here to add your own picture / howto / comment / youtube video to share with other users.

The same thing is possible using the webinterface, just go to

http://packages.sabayonlinux.org



Easy as pie i'd say.
Just use your forum account to login and share with others!

Creating a backup for entropy.

Entropy and its tools offer allot of things you might never guessed.

Lets take spritz and create a backup from our local client database. Its wise to make a backup of this client database every now and then because this holds all the information about your system installed packages.

Just hit "New Backup" and it will create a backup that we can use later in case of an emergency.

Running equo database backup will do the same thing.


I want to note that there are 2 databases that entropy uses.

• The online database that holds entries about every package you can install. This is the database that gets updated when you run "equo update". If for whatever reason this database get damaged, or when you cannot seem to update it using equo update, you can simply overwrite it and download a fresh new one using equo update --force.

• The client database that holds everything you have installed on your system. When this gets corrupted OR removed you are screwed unless you have a very recent backup made as i explained above.
  

Now if for whatever reason the client database is removed/corrupt and you didn't make any backup, there is one option that we can try to regenerate the client database.
Because we know from our online database what files belong to what package, we can scan the filesystem and poll the database and recreate our client database.

So if there is no way to get your things back togheter using a backup you can at the end of the line use our special escape: equo database resurrect