Sabayon has a reputation for pushing new desktop technologies into the forefront of Linux and this move will continue on that path, the announcement (commit) was made by our Great Leader(tm) Lxnay on the Sabayon development mailing list, as discussed previously Sabayon 5.2 is in closed beta testing and scheduled for release at the end of March.

I identified the root of most of the problems which  seemed to be that we were shipping a quite broken pulseaudio configuration based on hard-wiring an alsa module but also using the out dated hal detection module, this has now been corrected to using the shiny new udev detection module by default. Other improvements to the new setup are upmixing by default to 5.1 and LFE remixing.

I have also bumped the pulseaudio patch for Kmix so that is working nicely also, with multiple stream control working, global hotkey support fixed and should fix most pulse + kde issues.

As usual a “equo update && equo upgrade  –ask” will grab you the latest updates. If you have any issues please please please report a bug with logs on the bugzilla.

Garr are in the process of replacing the hardware and are looking to be back up soon, please bear with us until everything is back up and running.

Limbo users will have noticed lots of cool stuff has been added including the Phoronix Test Suite, KDE4.4RC, Emesene 1.6 as well as the usual swathes of updates. These updates  will ofcourse mature into Sabayon 5.2, so what can you expect? Highlights are:

• Sabayon 2.6.32 kernel
• Xorg 1.7
• KDE 4.4
• GRUB2
• Smaller ISOs due to dependency clean-ups
• Sexy new theme
• And More!

A 5.2 beta is due to be created soon and given out to our testers team,  the the main hold up is due to ATI not releasing a driver compatible with Xorg 1.7, we are undecided whether we are going to drop the binary ati-drivers in favour of the more reliable as nearly as complete open source ati driver, your opinion is needed here :).

So many things to look forward to there. We are looking for suggestions on ways to improve the disks so post a comment if you have a wishlist!

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 5.1

• Based on new GCC 4.4.1 and Glibc 2.10
• Shipped with Desktop-optimized Linux kernel 2.6.31 (ready for 2.6.32)
• Providing extra Server-optimized and OpenVZ-enabled kernels in repositories
• Installer now available in multiple languages
• Complete Ext4 filesystem support (used by default)
• Complete Encrypted filesystems support (via dmcrypt, available in the Installer)
• Featuring X.Org 7.5 and up-to-date FLOSS, NVIDIA, AMD video drivers
• Containing GNOME 2.28 (with GNOME Shell!) and KDE 4.3.4
• Outstanding 3D Desktop applications (Compiz, Compiz Fusion and KWin) working out of the box
• Bringing Entropy Framework (Package Manager) 0.99.19.1
• Shipped with OpenOffice 3.1 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! (Ian Whyman rocks)
• 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.o:

• KDE updated to 4.3.4 and now more integrated than ever!
• GNOME update to 2.28 and the outstanding new Desktop concept brought by GNOME Shell (available on DVD)
• Added the ability to try Sabayon under Windows via QEMU
• No more passwords to remember on Live system, just hit the Enter key
• Improved HDTV screens detection
• Entropy Framework updated to 0.99.19.1, featuring outstanding performance, tons of bugfixes and features (see our Git repos)
• More than 4000 new updated packages available
• Slightly improved Live boot speed
• Thanks to our Community, more than 120 new bugs were closed (see: Bugzilla) during this release cycle

Requirements

- an i686-compatible Processor (Intel Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Celeron, AMD K6-2, Athlon)
- 512Mb RAM
- 9 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
- 20 GB of free space
- A X.Org supported 3D GPU (Intel, AMD, NVIDIA) (esp. for XBMC)
- a DVD reader

Resources for Sabayon Linux 5.1 GNOME and KDE:

Kernel Configuration:
- Sabayon 5.1 x86 kernel config
- Sabayon 5.1 amd64 kernel config
Packages list:
- Sabayon Linux x86 5.1 KDE Packages
- Sabayon Linux x86-64 5.1 KDE Packages
- Sabayon Linux x86 5.1 GNOME Packages
- Sabayon Linux x86-64 5.1 GNOME Packages

Download sources

Our Mirrors Page:
- http://www.sabayon.org/download
Bittorrent:
- Sabayon Linux x86 5.1 KDE Torrent Download
- Sabayon Linux x86-64 5.1 KDE Torrent Download
- Sabayon Linux x86 5.1 GNOME Torrent Download
- Sabayon Linux x86-64 5.1 GNOME Torrent Download

As always comments are welcome.

Click the Image to enlarge to full size!

We have to remember that there are 3 core developers, 2 entropy maintainers and about 1o or so core staff, which is the entire Sabayon team and such our resources are not usually freely available.

Anyway, when browsing the bugzilla there are a few trends I would like to comment on, firstly and the bane of Azerthoth’s existence it seems, is that every single bug needs some basic information on a selection of things that are relevant to the bug.

• Hardware Issue – Dmesg, lspci or lsusb as appropriate, kernel version, entropy version.
• Entropy Package Issue – Exact version number of the package, Full install log, Any error messages produced by the application when run from a command line, entropy version, branch number and Arch.
• Live Disk Issues – Did you check the MD5, Did you burn slow?
• Overlay/Ebuild Issue – emerge –info output, full build log, portage version.

Just adding these simple bits of information makes the developers lives easier and allows the issue to get fixed quicker, so its best for everyone.

Secondly then is the issue of bug naming. For example the below is very bad and well, annoying:

 mail crashed

What does this tell the developers scanning through a buglist or seeing a notification email? Nothing at all about the actual issue, on the other hand a name like:

mail-client/evolution-2.8.3-r2: crash if I close the mail window while checking for new POP mail

Will definitely speed up the process and mean that it canbe put into the hands of the right people to deal with it straight away. Yay!

Finally then, is the issue of user persistence. Our bugzilla has a number of open bugs that are waiting on users to come back to the developers with feedback from possible fixes, version bumps, backports, recompiles etc. The users who went to the time and effort to report the bug now seem to have disappeared completely and the bug is just left hanging  open for a while until it gets closed as invalid due to lack of user input and the issue is therefore never really resolved 100%.

It is important that users stay with their issues and check it occasionally, by default bugzilla should mail you on activity on your bug so please keep an eye out for any updates.

So, that was enough moaning for me for today, but please try to remember the above information, its quite simple and helps to make the process nice and simple.

It shows, in my opinion quite comprehensively, the advantage of a Gentoo base system with the latest kernel and I reccomend you check out the figures for yourself.

The article states that big gains can be made but is it worth the time? I say no, use entropy and get the best of both worlds!

Oh, you can find the entropy make.conf on any entropy mirror, if you want to take a look at the setup we use to build entropy packages.

P.S. Kororaa Linux was not the first LiveCD w/ 3D desktop effects, that would be Sabayon (ofcourse!), Chris knows this, we have emails to prove it also, so he should really change his little bio on that site.

This repo is 64bit only currently. Sorry x86 users but you should really be on 64bit by now.

This Repo serves two purposes, firstly to test my PPA script and secondly to make the latest builds available to all sabayon users.

As expected ZERO support is given for mplayer issues, issues with the repo will be supported if possible.

All the information is available on my website the Mplayer PPA page.

:!: The packages will be masked by default so you will need to unmask them to use them, personally, I would do this though Sulfur however you can also use the masks found in /etc/entropy also.

There is a speed limit on the main server for entropy which was put in place by Lxnay to force people to use the mirrors and not stress the main Sabayon infrastructure, so any issues go to the boss!

Never fear, however as Limbo uses the extensive Entropy mirror network and all you have todo to get the usual blasingly fast(tm) speeds you expect is to let Entropy know that there is a mirror it can use instead.

How? Simply change your limbo entry in /etc/entropy/repositories.conf to read like the below

#Limbo
repository|sabayon-limbo|Sabayon Linux Limbo Repository|http://svn.sabayonlinux.org/entropy|http://svn.sabayonlinux.org/entropy#bz2
repository|sabayon-limbo|Sabayon Linux Limbo Repository|http://na.mirror.garr.it/mirrors/sabayonlinux/entropy/|

And then continue as normal.

As you can it simply adds the garr.it mirror (which is the default primary mirror) but feel free to pick another.

Just thought I’d let you know so hopefully we can reduce some of the load on svn.sabayonlinux.org and speed things up for sabayon users who are further away for Europe by using a local mirror. A list of mirrors can be found on the mirrors page.