Knowledge is Power
Posts tagged Sabayon Linux
Sabayon and Google Drive
191 days
I spent a few hours looking for a solution to getting google drive on my sabayon system much like dropbox, but found out that there really is no official way. Google seems to be slow on getting a linux client out or something.
Dropbox is nice, but at only 2GB of space and costs above that limit are lame compared to google drive. I use google for everything else so why not the drive. Once I log into my computer, the next thing I do is log into google to access all my stuff. I’m just surprised they don’t have linux support for their drive yet.
So looking around it seems Insync is popular, but it seems to favor gnome/kde/cinnamon which I don’t use. They say it’s free during beta, but I didn’t see any price as to what it will cost. So that is not for me.
gdrive-cli exists, but not what I am looking for. I want something like dropbox for my desktop environment.
I than ran across grive and this caught my eye and it’s open source! I had a fresh install of Sabayon Forensics and decided to install it and it was a snap to install and it works like a charm. You can follow my how-to here. Basically you grab the git, build it, and than run it. It’s not dropbox, but very close to it. With a cron job set up, I’m good to go. I know it goes against the religion of doing things outside of the package manager, but this is totally safe as you are doing all of this in your home directory and not messing with anything else.
I have moved the original Sabayon Forensics site over to Sabayon Forensics new home. I plan to house my personal how-to’s over there also.
Sabayon with a dash of Cinnamon
195 days
It’s been a while since I have taken some time to look at the development of Cinnamon the gnome-shell fork by Mint Linux. What inspired me to look at it again was confusion from users. Many people don’t seem to understand that cinnamon is not a stand alone desktop environment. Cinnamon depends on gnome as it’s a fork of gnome-shell, which belongs to Gnome 3. I would see users complain that they installed cinnamon, but it didn’t work. I found out many did not install gnome for it to work properly. So to test things out, I booted up Sabayon Forensics live USB and ran:
equo update && equo install cinnamon
Keep in mind Sabayon Forensics is a XFCE desktop environment. So once I issued that command, cinnamon pulled like 47 packages and many related to gnome of course. Cinnamon should pull the necessary gnome packages, so let it pull em.
Once that is done, log out and in your session you can choose cinnamon and watch cinnamon come to life as you log in.
Sabayon with Cinnamon
Note the images here are not the default cinnamon settings/looks upon install. I changed stuff all around for looks and settings. This was a good test for me to explore the abilities of cinnamon and I was very happy to see how much cinnamon has progress. They made promises and are delivering.
Sabayon with Cinnamon
Sabayon with Cinnamon
Sabayon with Cinnamon
Pretty slick I say. Yay for people out there fixing the default Gnome 3 GUI. Mint Linux even has forked nautilus and call it nemo after calling current nautilus a disaster. It’s sad to see what is happening in the Gnome world, but I don’t want to start a flame war so I will leave it at that.
So as you can see, installing cinnamon on sabayon should be no problem. Now if you’re using an ATI card, you may have issues with gnome-shell stuff. So please check the log files if you are having issues. I have no problems with nvidia or intel graphics.
Cheers to the cinnamon crew!
Sabayon 10 Coming Soon, Get Testing!
259 days
by wolfden
in Sabayon Linux
Sabayon 10
So it’s time for the world of Sabayon to focus on a new release. Fabio has started a bug tracker for Sabayon 10. So if you run across something, append to that bug report so it can get fixed before Sabayon 10 is released. It’s always exciting to see a release come together and we do depend on our user base to grab a daily ISO and test and report back issues during this time. The more people we have testing the better the release will be for everyone. Just make sure you provide as much information as possible on any issue found while testing. The isos that should be tested are the Gnome, KDE, XFCE and Core editions as they are our main releases. So try and focus on those isos for testing, but feel free to test as many of the editions as you want.
Report bugs to our bugzilla- http://bugs.sabayon.org and be sure to append to bug http://bugs.sabayon.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3598. Please don’t post bugs to bug 3598, simply make a new bug report and append bug 3598 to your new bug report and than it can be tracked to see what bugs were fixed and which ones need to be fixed yet. When you fill out the new bug report, simple find the Depends on text box and enter in 3598. You can see there is already 3 bug reports attached to 3598. Pretty neat huh?
So grab a daily ISO from your favorite mirror and throw everything ya got at it and report. For the love of humanity tho, please do not submit a bug that simply says, don’t work. We need to know everything to get it fixed. So please give complete reports and save a dev from jumping off a bridge.
Well Hello MATE!
328 days
by wolfden
in Sabayon Linux
The other day we got a new Sabayon daily ISO to try out and use. This iso is for the MATE desktop environment. So you can head to your favorite mirror and download Sabayon_Linux_DAILY_amd64_MATE.iso and make yourself a live bootable disc or usb device. I had previous tested out MATE by just installing it via limbo repo, which you can do also. It’s good to test the live iso and installing via entropy on an installed system. Keep in mind that this is a young and new project so it may take some time to gain some features. It’s also meant to be minimal stuff included. You won’t find firefox or chromium as Midori is the default browser. Feel free to give feed back on the Sabayon dev mailing list. So lets take a look at this ISO: (click images for larger version)
Sabayon MATE Edition Default
On boot I was presented with the Login window so I selected MATE from the session type and typed in sabayonuser as username and than hit enter and this is what one will be presented with. Notice there is a top panel, but it is blank. You can simple add the items you want on the panel by right clicking on it.
Sabayon MATE Edition
As you can see in the above pic I added the menu, window list, clock, and a run application as there is no Alt + F2. This is all personal preference as to what you want. Editing the background and themes is as easy as right clicking on the desktop and choosing change background.
Sabayon MATE Edition
Hey it’s getting better looking all the time. I had to use equo and install the faenza-icon-theme to get the icons with the theme.
Sabayon MATE Edition
So now I am liking how things are setup and was very simple and quick to do. No need to hunt down or install crazy extra apps to change things around.
Sabayon MATE Edition
One thing still bugging me was the icons on the desktop. In Linux mode, I do not like icons on my desktop, no matter what desktop environment. With windows, I have icons all over my desktop, strange, but seems more of a windows thing to me. So I wanted to get rid of my icons. I had to install mate-extra/mate-conf-editor with equo. I think personally this should be a default application as it allows customization. Now my icons are gone, woot!
Sabayon MATE Edition
So there we are, remember to keep in mind that this is minimal so things like flash and java aren’t even there. You can simple add what you need via entropy after install. How about we make it bit more special and add in compiz fusion?
Sabayon MATE Edition
So I fired up equo and issued a command line:
equo install x11-wm/compiz-fusion x11-wm/compiz x11-plugins/compiz-plugins-mainx11-plugins/compiz-plugins-extra x11-wm/emerald x11-themes/emerald-themes x11-apps/fusion-icon
I than added fusion-icon and emerald - -replace to the Startup Applications under System – Preferences. One thing you will need to do is fire up CCSM and make sure Window Decoration is checked otherwise you will loose your window decorations. You will need to check other things also like move window and all that good stuff. After that I logged out of the desktop environment and restarted xdm by doing Ctrl +Alt + F1 at the login screen. Once I logged back in, I had all the eye candy greeting me. Wobbly windows, emerald, and cube of course.
Sabayon MATE Edition
So if you don’t like the new Gnome or KDE and miss the old gnome, this is about as close as you’re gonna get. Download the ISO and give a test run or install it via entropy. We would love to hear your input on it.
Enjoy!
Argh at Udisks! Howto Gain Sanity Back
386 days
/start rant
A short vent of evil Udisks default policy of having to enter a password to mount a partition when in a GUI file manager. I boot the desktop up and if I open thunar, I should be able to open my music partition without getting prompted for a freakin root password. In the past I have simply edited /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.udisks.policy and under internal drive changed it to yes active to avoid the annoying situation. So I get the latest updates and discover we now have org.freedesktop.udisks2.policy which is now the new default file and just as annoying. I could simply edit that file, but be stuck with each time an update comes along it gets rewritten to default. Zomg super annoying! As a desktop user I should have access to my partitions without having to jump through hoops. So I browsed around and on the archwiki found a simple solution, Override that evil thing!
So I did:
groupadd storage
gpasswd -a wolfden storage
nano /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/10-storage-group-mount-override.pkla
and put in that file
[storage group mount override]
Identity=unix-group:storage
Action=org.freedesktop.udisks2.*
ResultAny=yes
ResultInactive=yes
ResultActive=yes
Restart and no more freakin password prompt to access my media files, sanity returns back to the desktop user. Sometimes trying to figure out the direction of linux is frustrating. Desktop environments are moving in a direction of making it so simple to use that a toddler can run it, but than you got something like udisks making it annoying with it’s default policies. I could understand the default policy of udisks if on a server machine, but not for a desktop user.
/end rant
Sabayon – Virtualbox Installation Woos
395 days
A little matter I would like to bring to your attention is our wiki page for Virtualbox can produce a small surprise. The scenario is that you download Sabayon 8 version, install it and than decide to install Virtualbox and Virtualbox pulls a lot of stuff including a new kernel of 3.3. Sabayon 8 iso comes with kernel 3.2 so when you go and install Virtualbox you are indirectly invoking a kernel upgrade. So the question is how to install Virtualbox.
Well, here is what I would do. We keep our packages updated so we might as well upgrade the kernel also, but instead I would do it in a bit of different order of just doing equo install virtualbox-bin, I’d start with kernel-switcher.
We can use equo search linux-sabayon to see what the latest kernel is. And in my case it shows sys-kernel/linux-sabayon-3.3-r2 is the latest kernel. To see what your current kernel version is, simply run uname -r.
So now we can upgrade the kernel with:
kernel-switcher switch sys-kernel/linux-sabayon-3.3-r2
This will than upgrade the kernel and all the needed modules and add the entry to your grub. Now at this point and time I would reboot and boot into the new kernel. Once rebooted I would than:
equo install virtualbox-bin
The modules should pull, but if not:
equo install virtualbox-modules#`uname -r`
Continue On
depmod -a
modprobe vboxdrv
modprobe vboxnetadp
modprobe vboxnetflt
usermod -a -G vboxusers YOUR_USER_NAME
Now go ahead and log out and than log back in so the changes can be applied.
To get virtualbox modules to load automatically:
# nano /etc/conf.d/modules
add to it:
modules="vboxdrv vboxnetflt vboxnetadp"
then save and exit, reboot.
Once you have Virtualbox installed you won’t have to worry about pulling kernels, it’s just that initial install and if there is a new kernel available scenario. If one had downloaded and install Sabayon 8 and installed Virtualbox before kernel 3.3 came out, one would never of had to fuss with a different kernel.
The only thing we are really doing that the wiki doesn’t cover is switching the kernel first. Why do I recommend using kernel-switcher vs just installing it all with equo install virtualbox-bin? The main thing is, you’re changing kernels so I want to keep that process simple and smooth vs pulling it and doing a bunch of updates along side it. In theory both methods should work, I just want to take the extra step and make sure it goes right.
Sabayon and Rigo, Bye Bye Sulfur
409 days
by wolfden
in Sabayon Linux
Rigo has become available in the entropy store finally. So what is this talk of Rigo you may ask, it’s a replacement of Sulfur. Sulfur will no longer exist in the future so Rigo will be the new and improved GUI package manager for entropy store. I really never was a fan of Sulfur, but than I’m not really a fan of GUI package managers anyway. This is my first look at Rigo. Keep in mind that Rigo is still in development to only get better and better. So to give it a whirl and install it via equo install rigo. Click images for larger version (Note: Rigo is early stages of Development yet)
- Upon launch it comes up and checks for updates
Rigo on Launch
- Clicking on Show gives me the list of updates and I can now click on Update System
Updates to Apply
- I have a license to agree too, very simple and straight forward
Rigo Package License Agreement
- Now Rigo is off and running as it tells me it is in progress
Rigo is Updating
- You might not believe it and want proof so you click on Show me and now you can see it’s downloading the packages
Rigo Update Progress
- Downloading completes and now it’s installing updates
Rigo Installing Updates
- After updates are installed it tells you it has upgraded your system successfully.
Rigo Done With Updates
So lets take a look at just doing an individual Package. Back at the home screen I simply type the package I am looking for.
Looking for Firefox
So now firefox has come up, I can click on it to go right to Install or view more info. (In this case I have firefox installed already so instead of a remove button it would be a install button.) So you can see here that you can do same steps to remove a package.
Package Options
So clicking on More Info gets you a ton more of information and from here you can click the Install button.
Package Information
Installing
Rigo Installing Firefox
Installed succesfully
Rigo is Finished
I would like to note that I ran all this off of the Live version of Sabayon Forensics and Rigo ran smoothly. Normally if I start up Sulfur on the live session Sulfur becomes unresponsively slow, so seeing Rigo fire right up and working instantly is very sweet.
Remember, Rigo is still early stages yet and features to come yet. So if you give it a try and see things missing, just hold on as it’s coming.
Sabayon 8 vs. Xorg vs. Nvidia
485 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?
493 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.
Rolling Release, So What Version Do I Have?
582 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.
