What's Going On?
Knowledge is Power
Sabayon 8 vs. Xorg vs. Nvidia
015 days
by wolfden
in Sabayon Linux
Sabayon 8 Gnome with Extensions
Sabayon 8 is starting to shape up and if you are doing the updates via the package manager, you should see the new artwork implemented. Like with any release we do, there is always a decision to be made of what stays and what goes. This is not always an easy decision as we don’t want to cause chaos. A tough decision was made about xorg-server-1.11, which doesn’t work with legacy nvidia cards. We decided we can’t hold back because of that and have implemented xorg-server-1.11. So now what?
First, if you are unsure if your card is a Nvidia legacy card, you can refer to this Nvidia page and see. It will also explain to you what a legacy card is.
Second, you’re still in luck as the opensource Nvidia driver called Nouveau can be used to replace the package nvidia-drivers. If you need information about what that is, check out this home page and the Gentoo wiki page. You can also see they are available in entropy and portage. I hear really good things about Nouveau, but I have no personal experience with it. I upgrade my hardware frequently so I’m never having to deal with such things.
Third, if your hardware is just plain old I would recommend looking at distros that are focused on older hardware. Some of these distros would be like knoppix, puppy linux, xubuntu and crunchbag. I actually have xubuntu that I just installed the other day on a older machine that I have. It has the legacy fx5200 card and I found that xubuntu ran great.
We aren’t the only distro that is running into this issue with legacy cards. A while back on my Ubuntu machine it wanted to upgrade to the latest release, but at the same time I got a big old warning box telling me that my hardware probably would not work well with it so I opt to not do it and just retire the machine for now. I have a huge tote full of legacy stuff that I am looking at throwing out as it is no longer good for anything. That 2400 baud modem just isn’t gonna get used again. Even my old faithful 1x cdrom that still works isn’t gonna ever be used again.
Anyway, Sabayon 8 is looking good and I’m expecting a release in the very near future. I think about all that is left to do is decide on the gnome 3 default desktop and a couple of bug fixes. We are kinda leaning towards default gnome 3 with some extensions instead of Cinnamon as default. Cinnamon is just still too alpha to go prime time. The gnome-shell extensions really help improve the usability of gnome. I’m interested in hearing from people what their favorite extensions are. Look for a release announcement soon.
Sabayon Entropy Updates?
023 days
by wolfden
in Sabayon Linux
I’ve seen a couple of recent posts lately and the topic comes up from time to time about updates. It’s tough to please people and updates. It’s either too often or not enough it seems. Personally, I don’t see what the big deal is. There could be updates everyday, it don’t matter to me and I never question if I do an equo update and it says I’m current. Some get a bit nervous when they don’t see updates and start thinking something is broke. There is a simple solution to put your worries at rest. I love RSS, borderline rss junkie even. So all you have to do is load up your favorite rss reader and put in the package update rss. These can be found on the mirrors.
So for example, a weekly x86_64 user can use the following link
http:
A weekly x86 user can use:
http:
Now you can follow along and see when and what was all dumped into the repo. I like to use google reader as than I can access my rss feeds from any where. Click image to make bigger.
Simple enough to put your worries to rest. Some more feeds:
Limbo x86_64 - http:
Limbo x86 - http:
Main x86_64 - http:
Main x86 - http:
Feel free to use the mirror of your choice http://sabayon.org/mirrors RSS can also be used with our gits. For example our
entropy git - http:
artwork git - http:
You can find the various git stuff here - https://git.sabayon.org/
Soon you will be collecting rss from other sites and growing your list till it’s out of control. No excuse for not knowing what is going on.
Can Cinnamon Flavored Sabayon Save Gnome?
225 days
by wolfden
in Sabayon Linux
Gnome 3 fiasco has come and gone, oh wait, it’s still here, but at least people are hacking away at it to make it a bit better. We’ve been seeing apps to help customize the devastation and now Linux Mint has forked the default gnome-shell and started a project that gives you an option of a different shell called Cinnamon. We have introduced the Cinnamon to the limbo repository for testing and I’ve only heard positive things about it from those that have tested it. Sabayon running Cinnamon below:
Here you can see Cinnamon with the menu system open, looks a bit rude at first, but functions quite well.
A bit busy
Pull back and select the application you want
So the great thing about this that I love is the old traditional desktop feel that I am most comfortable in. No huge icons and drilling down through more huge icons to find an application. The menu system gets you were you need to get quickly. Call me old, but I enjoy the simple desktop and hate huge icons. I’m glad to see others feel the same and are actually producing forks and hacks. Gnome devs need to, well I’m not gonna get on that rant or I’ll be writing a book.
So what about the negatives? Well, I’m not gonna say that there is negatives due to the fact that Cinnamon is young and new and is gonna grow quickly with changes to make it better. Like right now the customization abilities are very limited. The gnome-tweak-tool will allow you to make some changes. A trick I found to do was to log into the regular gnome session and use gnome-tweak-tool to make changes and than logout and return to the cinnamon session where most things will stick. You can’t change window borders, but I can live with that for now. Linux Mint has already said that in the next version that customization tools are high priority.
I should clear the air here incase people are scared to screw up their gnome default by installing Cinnamon. When you install Cinnamon it creates a new login session called Cinnamon. So when you are at your login screen, choose Cinnamon from the session to log into it. You can log back into regular gnome by logging out and than choose Gnome in the session. So no fear, you won’t loose nor harm your gnome default session. If you are using lxdm, make sure you have the latest version from limbo repo installed otherwise lxdm can’t start the session.
Sabayon needs to make some changes to it, such as branding the menu button and we will be changing the category it is in now that Gentoo has added it to portage under gnome-extra. There is discussion about an idea of making Cinnamon the default session in Sabayon 8. Remember the regular gnome session will be there also, so don’t go yelling at your monitor we are crazy if we do such a thing, just select Gnome for your session if you are not a Cinnamon fan. I encourage everyone to take a look at it at least once and give it a try. With Cinnamon available, I actually installed Gnome back on to my main system.
Happy New Year from Sabayon Land
33 days
Happy New Year to all! Now that the holidays are over it’s time to get back to work or unless you were like me and got to work through the holidays, so is life.
So I am continuously testing the Sabayon Forensics XFCE x86-64 edition and happy to see that things are nice and stable for me. I haven’t heard any complaints from anyone either, so all good it seems.
I’ve been looking at this ARM stuff and slowly trying to grasp all of it. Fabio has been busy with the ARMv7 stuff on his beagleboard. A wiki page is even been dedicated to it. If you are interested in it, be sure to see those links to learn more. I’ve been eyeing up the Pandaboard lately as it seems to offer plenty. If you’re interested in testing and developing, give a shout to our mail list and let us know.
Fabio is gonna take a much needed short holiday and than the plans will be set in motion to get a Sabayon 8 out the door. The daily iso is working so well that I’m not seeing much effort needed to push this one out. A new artwork package was talked about so will see where that ends up at. I myself would like to see something new and refreshing. My current desktop looks something like this:
current xfce desktop
Regardless, if you’re keeping your system up to date, you are rolling right along with the changes. Keep up to date and keep reporting any bugs. Please see this bug for the Sabayon 8 release stuff, just append to it. We kinda want to get Sabayon 8 out the door by end of February, sooner the better.
2012 is looking good for Sabayon. We have more people helping with the server stuff. We got the ARM project in motion. I’m still seeing the flow of Ubuntu refugees arriving and loving Sabayon. It’s good to have yas onboard btw. The recent reviews I have read have all been very positive. Also, it sounds like Fabio will be rewritting a new Sulfur from scratch for Sabayon 9 release later this year, hopefully mid-year. So good news for the Sulfur or Entropy Store users. So stick around and invite a friend or two.
Season Greetings
43 days
by wolfden
in Sabayon Linux
It’s that wonderful time of year again, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all. I hope everyone is spending a wonderful time with family and friends and that Santa leaves you a special present if you weren’t on the naughty list.
Time has been busy for me as I have been in the process of upgrading/replacing my entertainment system to HD. Out with the VCR and in with the Blu-ray and new TV, lots to learn before I made purchases. My biggest goal was to get a wireless system for my videos from my hard drive to the tv. So between handbrake converting videos to .mkv files, blu-ray player and samba, I achieve that goal. The wireless tv and the internet apps that it has makes for a great tv. The blu-ray player also has more internet apps, so a ton of options with just a remote. I also have the laptop connected via dbus cable where I can launch boxee or xbmc for even more options.
I subscribed to huluplus as I am thinking of dropping my Satellite tv subscription to save some money. Between huluplus and netflix I can continue to watch 90% of the stuff I do and save some cash. With the cash saved, I could look at the beagleboard. Fabio has been teasing me with pictures of his and than seeing the development work for Sabayon on beagleboard is exciting. A dedicated beagleboard for multimedia apps sounds awesome. So I will see what happens here.
To Install or Not?
104 days
To install or not is the question I’ve been asking myself. My laptop has windows 7 installed and works fine and I use it for business usage while doing photography as I can use it to trigger my camera and view images with Lightroom. I really don’t need linux on it and as long as I have a USB stick, I can boot it up to linux anytime I want to. I thought I would give a test and see what would happen if I just leave it run and drag it around with me to work and home with just a live USB. I popped Sabayon Forensics amd64 XFCE on to the USB stick and I’m over 3 days now and it’s working flawlessly. I’ve even used entropy to install some applications I wanted. So the only advantage I would get if I installed it is the ability to save. I’m not gonna be using my laptop and linux where I need to save tho. I have a desktop for my main productive work and I’ve even been sshing in from the laptop to do some of that work.
An eight dollar USB drive and you can make a computer come to life. The performance over a dvd drive is 100xs better. The wonderful tool molecule, which is available in entropy, can help you make a custom Sabayon for your needs. So if you are interested, check out the Sabayon wiki for a molecule howto.
I’m gonna continue to let this run an and see what happens.
Sabayon Forensics XFCE Available
109 days
by wolfden
in Sabayon Forensics
The first release of the Sabayon Forensics XFCE edition is available on the mirrors for download. I am dropping the Gnome 3 desktop and KDE for a much lighter desktop environment that will work better across the computer land. This edition is built off the Sabayon Daily XFCE edition and is released weekly, so every Monday you can get an updated version. I highly recommend to learn and use rsync to keep your iso updated instead of downloading a new iso each time. As easily as something like:
rsync -avP rsync://ftp.SURFnet.nl/sabayonlinux/iso/daily/Sabayon_Linux_DAILY_amd64_ForensicsXfce.iso /home/wolfden/isos/amd64/
There is a x86 and a x86_64 version of this edition. Before I only had the x86 versions available, so now the best of both worlds. I have all the information where to get the isos on the website and even added another page of Other Tools, which is information on some basic commandline stuff.
There is an issue with the current theme and the OSD notification as it ends up being black on black, argh! I have fixed this so this coming Monday it will get implemented. There is other themes you can simply change to also.
Another issue and I forgot to look into this, but Autopsy is failing to start. I’ll work on getting that sorted. I’m not even sure when it broke.
So what is Sabayon Forensics you ask? I shall point you to the About page where you can learn more. What about a package list you ask? I shall point you to the FAQ page and at the bottom you can get the package list. Can I install it you may ask, yes you can install and use it as a rolling system with entropy just like any normal Sabayon release.
Ophcrack was dropped and I filed a bug with gentoo about ophcracktables being a dependent of ophcrack. It would be nice to include ophcrack and the users download and store the tables on USB or DVD discs. The ophcracktables package doesn’t even include all the tables nor has any effect on ophcrack running. Ophcracktables is 1GB in size and with people on slow internet, it’s a pain. Of course gentoo closed the bug and won’t fix it. So you can install ophcrack program on the live system by doing equo install ophcrack –nodeps and than you can load the tables from a usb or disc. I don’t get gentoo devs at times, it would be like making flash a dependent of every browser.
I’m open to forensic tools too add to it, just give me a holler. I don’t want to increase the file size too badly tho, but if a program is worth while, than yes. Screenshots and usage can be found on the Using Sabayon Forensic page. I do not help people with hacking and cracking, that is not what it’s about so don’t even ask.
I’m sure I probably forgot to mention something, but if you look it over you’ll see it’s pretty self explanatory.
Rolling Release, So What Version Do I Have?
112 days
by wolfden
in Sabayon Linux
I’ve been looking over the forum and still amazed that people just don’t get what a rolling release is. People are making it way harder than it is to figure out what version they are running. The first thing you need to do is forget the whole idea of version. Version number doesn’t mean anything to you in a rolling release.
Sabayon rolling release concept works like this. You install your favorite version of Sabayon and learn the package manager via the wonderful Sabayon Wiki. You use the package manager to do your updates daily, weekly, monthly or whenever you choose to do updates. The updates carry you forward and keep you current through the entire lifetime of your Sabayon original installation. As long as you are alive and able to run the updates, your Sabayon is current. You installed Sabayon 6 and kept up with the updates to make you current. Sabayon 7 comes along, are you now running Sabayon 7? Not really, you are running Current. A release just helps those that are new to Sabayon get an installation in without having to do 3 trillion updates and doing manual fixes. Can you imagine trying to take Sabayon 1 and trying to update it today? It would be impossible cause so much has changed. A release is for new people, hence a version is given to a release.
So if you are doing your equo update && equo upgrade you are without a version as you are Current. So next time you wonder what version you have, ask yourself, did I run equo update && equo upgrade today, if the answer is yes, than you are Current. If the answer is no, than equo update && equo upgrade so that you are Current. Now you can stop laying awake at nights and making silly forum posts the next day wondering if you are running Sabayon 7. You are running Current, it’s just that simple.
New to Me
120 days
One of the benefits of testing different isos is that once in a while you run across a new to me program. A new to me program is a program that has been around for a while, but you never knew about it. That makes sense right? So testing the Sabayon XFCE edition and I run across Geany and it’s an instant hit with me. It even has plugins you can add to it. The packages are in entropy as dev-util/geany and dev-util/geany-plugins if you are interested in trying it.
Geany on Sabayon Forensics XFCE
How about that for timing on the screenshot, looks like I have an update from entropy to install. So Sabayon Forensics amd64 is pretty much a go now. It successfully installs and works great. I’m building the x86 shortly to test and once Sabayon 7 is out the door, will work on availability to the public.
Packages added:
sys-apps/mlocate,
media-fonts/droid,
app-misc/screen,
app-forensics/cmospwd,
app-forensics/rkhunter,
app-forensics/sleuthkit,
app-antivirus/clamav,
app-antivirus/clamtk,
app-forensics/autopsy,
app-forensics/mac-robber,
app-forensics/aide,
app-forensics/rdd,
app-crypt/chntpw,
media-video/vlc,
x11-wm/awesome,
net-libs/libnet,
net-libs/netwib,
net-analyzer/traceroute,
media-gfx/picasa,
app-admin/testdisk,
app-crypt/fcrackzip,
app-crypt/johntheripper,
sys-fs/extundelete,
app-forensics/magicrescue,
net-analyzer/nmap,
net-analyzer/netcat6,
net-irc/irssi,
net-analyzer/wireshark,
net-analyzer/tcpdump,
gnome-extra/nm-applet,
net-misc/knock,
www-client/chromium,
x11-terms/terminator,
xfce-extra/tumbler,
app-crypt/gifshuffle,
app-crypt/pdfcrack,
dev-util/geany,
dev-util/geany-plugins,
x11-misc/pcmanfm
Packages Removed:
app-dicts/aspell-de,
app-dicts/aspell-fr,
app-dicts/aspell-it,
app-dicts/aspell-nl,
app-dicts/aspell-pl,
app-dicts/myspell-de,
app-dicts/myspell-es,
app-dicts/myspell-fr,
app-dicts/myspell-it,
app-dicts/myspell-nl,
app-misc/sabayon-music,
mail-client/mailx,
mail-client/mailx-support,
net-p2p/transmission-base,
net-p2p/transmission-gtk+,
www-client/midori,
x11-wm/fluxbox,
x11-terms/xterm,
media-gfx/shotwell,
net-firewall/ufw,
net-firewall/ufw-frontends,
games-misc/cowsay,
app-editors/gedit
Custom skel files of course. Someone asked about Stegnography stuff, but I’m not seeing a lot of programs on this, especially in entropy. I’m open to suggestions for programs on this, but they need to be at least in portage for a package request. I’ve left ophcrack off in this edition. It keeps the file size down so I suggest to those that do want it, you can still have it. You can install ophcrack from entropy to the live session with the command equo install ophcrack –nodeps and than I would keep the ophcrack tables on disk or usb device and than just point ophcrack to those files. I have more luck with chntpw than ophcrack so that is another reason I don’t want to include it. I’m open to suggestions for packages, leave me a message here or email me at wolfden@sabayon.org. Oh yea, remember on the wireshark to add your username to the wireshark group with command like gpasswd -a myawesomenamehere wireshark and you will need to restart your session.
I can smell the Sabayon 7 isos cooking in Italy…..
Testing, XFCE to the Rescue
122 days
What a busy week it has been with testing, finding bugs, confirming and submitting. Generally I test Gnome and KDE isos, but this time went off the wall as my frustrations grow with both Gnome and KDE and decided to test XFCE 64 bit edition. Last time I looked at XFCE was like version 4.0, so to my surprise 4.8 will knock your socks off compared to that.
So I have decided that with my Sabayon Forensic spins, I will go with xfce instead. I’ve been up to my ears in the skel files learning the xfce ways, adding and removing packages and been testing local isos via the wonderful tool molecule. My computer is feeling the pains tho, molecule will really give those cpus a work out. So drop the KDE and Gnome editions and just go with XFCE to make this simpler and more universal for working with various computers. Gnome-shell is kinda of a nightmare right now on various hardware. KDE has it’s issues too, but works better than gnome-shell.
Fabio would like to get the final bugs in so he can fix and release in a few days. So grab a daily ISO file from sabayon mirrors and either submit issues to the dev mailing list or our bugzilla. If you file a bug, you can block bug 2581 so Fabio will for sure see it. The more people testing the better, so it’s not too late to test for Sabayon 7. Gnome and KDE testing is critical as I haven’t seen much testing on those, but there is also e-17, lxde, etc.
Sneak Peek and Coming Soon:
Sabayon Forensics XFCE x86_64
