new sabayon release

I installed Sabayon 13.04 back on July 29th (see my post from then), but hadn't gotten around to logging into Fluxbox (which Sabayon comes with) and tweaking that to suit my tastes until yesterday. Finally got that all done.

Today, I noticed that Sabayon 13.08 has been released. Here's the announcement. With this release, systemd becomes the default init system for Sabayon, but since I installed from the earlier release, I'm still using OpenRC (SysVinit) in Sabayon. OpenRC support may last for another year or so, but it would probably be a good idea for me to get on with things and switch over to systemd.

Ugh. I'm reading up on systemd at the Gentoo wiki (http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Systemd). I'm hoping that there will soon be detailed instructions at the Sabayon wiki, or in the Sabayon forums, for users who want to switch without doing a fresh installation. I'm not bothered by the idea of using systemd, as I'm already using it in a couple other distros; I just don't want to destroy my current Sabayon installation, and don't really want to do a fresh installation right now. So, I'll hold off a little longer and learn a bit more, then I'll go for it and see how things work out.

sabayon 13.04

Updated my Sabayon system today, but then was unable to boot into the system. After examining the situation, I decided to reinstall. Downloaded Sabayon_Linux_13.04_x86_KDE.iso and installed it.

The initial installation wasn't too difficult or time-consuming (installing it to the hard drive from a DVD took about 20 minutes), but setting things up after that took some hours -- all afternoon, really.

Anyway, I got everything finished up, pretty much. I still want to set up Fluxbox, which comes with Sabayon, but that won't take long; I copied the files from the previous installation.

Hopefully, I'll be able to keep this installation going for at least as long as the last one, which survived for about 13 months. I think I would have been able to keep that one going longer, but I think I made some mistakes over the past year or so that eventually led to today's breakage; I couldn't see how to easily get things fixed, so I figured it was time for a fresh installation.

After getting everything set up and bringing in all the updates, I once again have a beautiful Sabayon desktop, with KDE 4.10.5.

approaching an anniversary

My Sabayon installation has just about made it through a full year. I installed the Gentoo-based Sabayon 9, which shipped with KDE 4.8.3, back on June 26, 2012. The latest release was called a "monthly release," to Sabayon 13.04 (here's the release announcement). That came out in April. The updates I brought in this morning gave me KDE 4.10.4.

There are some people who say that over time the rolling-release Sabayon becomes unusable. That hasn't been the case here; perhaps some people aren't following the instructions given by the devs at the Sabayon site and in the forums.

One drawback with Sabayon is that the updates can be frequent, massive, and time consuming. I use the sabayon-weekly repository. I usually see updates available each Saturday or Sunday, so I bring them in once a week.

But Sabayon has been great for me. I've been able to find everything I've needed in the repos. Sabayon's KDE desktop is perhaps the most beautiful of any distro. Not much bugginess to speak of. Good documentation and the devs communicate well with the users. It has turned out to be one of the best distros I've used. Hopefully, I'll be saying the same things around the end of June next year.

four point ten

I've been using KDE 4.10 in Chakra for about a month and in Sabayon for a little more than a week. Yesterday, I was surprised to see updates available in Fedora 17 for KDE 4.10.1, so I brought 'em in.

KDE4 is looking very good these days, and 4.10 seems like a very nice step forward from what's come before -- more polished, and faster.

Looks like Debian Wheezy will have KDE 4.8.4 when it finally becomes Debian Stable; Mepis will probably stick with what's in the Wheezy repos. I think that'll be fine for most Mepis users; I'm still using KDE 4.8.5 in openSUSE 12.2, with no complaints. But most distros are more up-to-date with KDE than Debian is, so the next Mepis release might be a tough sell for KDE-lovers -- unless rock-solid, Debian-ish stability is a primary concern, or unless the user is a devoted Mepis fan already. KDE 4.10 is already available via PPAs in Kubuntu, and the next Kubuntu release (in April) will come with it by default. openSUSE 12.3 comes with 4.10.0. Even PCLinuxOS is already at 4.9.5, I think.

But whether it's 4.8.x or 4.10.x, good times for KDE users.

at the cutting edge

This week's updates bring KDE version 4.9.5 to Sabayon 10. Sweet!

on to 4.9.4

The latest updates in Sabayon Linux bring KDE up to version 4.9.4.

Interesting ride here so far with Sabayon. Definitely a fast-moving "rolling release" distro. I've been running it for six months now, always wondering if something brought in with the weekly updates will break the system, but everything's been fine so far. Excellent and fascinating distro.

From back in April, 2012: Interview With Fabio Erculiani Of Sabayon Linux. That's a good interview to read for anyone interested in Sabayon. Erculiani can also be followed at Google+ and on Twitter. Also, check out Ixnay's blog, "On The Other Hand."

finally...

The release announcement for Sabayon 10: http://www.sabayon.org/release/press-release-sabayon-10

For GNOME 2 die-hards, MATE is available for installation in Sabayon 10. For others, they've got KDE 4.9, GNOME 3.4.2, and XFCE 10.0.

World domination (as "Ixnay" likes to say)! Anyway, the distro (and this release) looks nice.

Sabayon X

I haven't seen a Sabayon 10 distribution release announcement yet, but it appears to be imminent. I brought in all the updates for my Sabayon 9 installation yesterday, and now I see the following:

# cat /etc/sabayon-release
Sabayon Linux x86 10

And my log-in screen's wallpaper looks like this:

Everything looks good so far.

sabayon stuff

Refreshing to see blog posts like this one from "Ixnay," who I guess is a key member of Sabayon's dev team: Equo rewrite, Sabayon 10 and Google

I don't understand half of what he wrote about, but at least he communicates with the users and let's us know what's going on.

Sabayon, a cutting-edge distro, really isn't my cup of tea, in a way. Sort of like how I couldn't see myself using only Fedora instead of something like Debian Stable (or something based on Stable), or even Ubuntu LTS. I like to have something that I'm pretty sure won't get borked by updates.

But Sabayon and Fedora are kinda fun to use, and interesting. Fortunately, I don't have to choose; I can play it safe and run a "stable" distro, but also live on the edge a bit with something like Sabayon.

Here's an excerpt from Ixnay's post, outlining some upcoming developments in Sabayon:

Before leaving for Dublin, we (as in the Sabayon team) are planning to release Sabayon 10. improved ZFS support, improved Entropy & Rigo experience (all the features users asked me about have been implemented!), out of the box KMS improvements, BFQ iosched as default scheduler (I am a big fan of Paolo Valente’s work) a load of new updates (from the Linux kernel to X.Org, from GNOME to KDE through MATE) and if we have time, more Gentoo-hardened features.

My biggest issue with Sabayon so far was a few weeks back when, while pulling in weekly updates, I kept getting a 'data not available on this mirror' message for just about every package that equo tried to pull from the first three repositories it tried. That really made the upgrade process agonizingly slow. It seemed to be the exact same situation that's described in this bug report from a few months back. At the end of that bug reports are notes from Fabio Erculiani noting that the mirrors were later updated or re-synchronized; I guess the same problem creeped up again, and was resolved again.

It might be interesting to see what improvements they have in store for Rigo, their GUI front-end for Entropy. I still don't use it for updating my system, though; I prefer to go to the command line:

# equo update
# equo upgrade --ask
# equo conf update

Sabayon 9 currently has KDE 4.9.00 and Chromium 21.0.1180.57 (148591). It's a rolling-release distro, so all I should have to do is keep up with the weekly updates and I'll be looking at Sabayon 10 sometime in October.

I've only been running Sabayon since late June, but I'm impressed by this distro, overall. Remains to be seen how I feel a couple of years down the road.

my kde installations

I'm running KDE in five different distros here: Mepis, PCLinuxOS, openSUSE, Fedora, and Sabayon. Each distro is excellent.

Mepis ships with only KDE.

According to DistroWatch, openSUSE's default desktop is KDE, Sabayon's is "GNOME/KDE," and Fedora's is GNOME; but all three of those distros have other spins.

In Mepis 11, I'm using KDE 4.5.3. The Mepis Community has stepped forward with ways to upgrade to newer KDE versions, but I've stayed with the "old" one in Mepis because it works fine, and because I have newer versions running in other distros here. The Mepis 12 "alpha" is about to be released, and I think that might be coming with KDE 4.8.4, which is in the Debian Testing repos.

PCLinuxOS 2012.02 (fully upgraded here from the original 2010.07 installation) is at KDE 4.6.5. The next "quarterly" release (right now, they're working on the 2012.06 "trial release") will have KDE 4.8.3. Users who do not wish to do a fresh installation will be able to upgrade KDE from 4.6.5 to 4.8.3 by running a script that will be provided.

openSUSE 12.1 has KDE 4.7.2.

Fedora 17 and Sabayon 9 ship with KDE 4.8.3, but last weekend I pulled in an update to 4.8.4 in Sabayon, so that's the most up-to-date distro here as far as KDE is concerned.

openSUSE and Fedora have shorter release cycles than the other three distros (approximately 8 and 6 months, respectively), and I don't expect to see newer KDE versions in either openSUSE 12.1 or Fedora 17.

Sabayon and PCLinuxOS are rolling-release distros; usually, all you have to do is keep your system updated and you'll be "current." But Sabayon is currently more of a "cutting-edge" distro than PCLinuxOS.

At the end of a Mepis release cycle, a fresh installation is recommended (if not required) to move to the next version. Fedora provides an upgrade path (called "Preupgrade" -- I hear it's good, but I haven't tried it), as does openSUSE.

All of these different distros have done well with their respective KDE implementations, and all are quite pleasant to use, but each one might appeal to different types of users. Folks who love Mepis don't care about having the "latest and greatest" stuff; stability is the priority. Fedora and Sabayon users might want to be closer to the cutting edge. openSUSE and Fedora users might not be keen on using a "one-man distro."

But each of these distros has many happy users in its camp, and I'm sure that any one of the five would be quite suitable for anyone who wants to stick with only one distro over a long period of time.

fluxbox in sabayon

Sabayon 9 comes with Fluxbox, so I decided to log into a session and have a look around.

By default, they went with the Nyz style, which fits nicely with the default Sabayon 9 wallpaper.

But I found the default Fluxbox menu quite lacking; there was no mention of Chromium or Dolphin, for example -- under Net > Browsers, I found Konqueror and Lynx, and under File utils, I again found Konqueror.

But Konqueror is a very useful application to start out with in Fluxbox when the menu isn't set up yet. After navigating to the Home directory, I could get to applications via Go > Applications; or, I could do much the same thing by navigating to Settings > Show Sidebar, then clicking on the Services button on the left side.

That allowed me to open up applications without using the command line, even if they weren't shown in the default Fluxbox menu. I've used Fluxbox many times before, so I have copies of old ~/.fluxbox/menu files to work refer to. I saved a copy of Sabayon's original ~/.fluxbox/menu file, then proceeded to create my own menu.

That's good enough for now.

One nice feature about Fluxbox is the ability to tab applications at the top of one window. I don't use this feature much because having a panel kinda makes it redundant, but it's useful sometimes when you have a lot going on.

I thought Sabayon should have done a better job of setting up the default Fluxbox menu to show some of the available applications, but it's kinda fun setting it up yourself, too. You can always run applications by opening up a terminal; and, the main menu has a "Run" entry, which opens the "Run Program" box:

As with KDE, Fluxbox in Sabayon 9 is fast and beautiful. Nice touch by the devs to include it!

the new addition

After checking out the live session a little bit, I installed Sabayon 9 KDE in a multi-boot set-up with three other Linux distros, on my notebook. The installer seemed clear and sensible; the one thing that struck me as odd was the dig at Debian Stable in the slideshow that runs during the installation ("debian stable? pfft! OLD!!").

I spent some time looking over Sabayon's wiki, which has plenty of good and important information, especially for someone like me who is brand new to Sabayon. Its "Introduction" section includes installation instructions and info on what to do with a fresh installation, like how to get the system completely up-to-date using the Entropy package manager, with equo commands from the command line. A separate section of the wiki provides more info on Entropy. Here's a link to the Sabayon wiki.

Once I made sure the system was up-to-date, I customized things to my tastes:

It seemed like a good idea for me to get used to running the Entropy package manager from the command line, but I wanted to at least take a look at Rigo, Entropy's new GUI front-end. When you first start Rigo up, you see that they use it to send information notices, which strikes me as a very nice touch:

You can search for applications by name, or by category, and then install what you want.

There's a notification applet on the panel that tells you when updates become available. Now that my system is up-to-date, here's what it looks like when I right-click on the applet:

Clicking on "Use Packages web interface" opens up Chromium and takes you to http://packages.sabayon.org/. where you can get more info about what's available. Looks good.

For now, I think I'll stick with using Entropy from the command line.

The distro looks like it's put together well. Its desktop strikes me as being perhaps the most beautiful one I've seen. The documentation seems good and the system seems stable.  Sabayon 9 KDE seems quite fast and responsive, although updating and installing packages seems to take a long time. I mentioned a few reviews of this release in my blog post yesterday, and those would provide more detailed info than I would, but I will say that Sabayon looks like a very pleasant Linux distribution, and one that I hope to be running here for a very long time.

sabayon

I downloaded Sabayon 9 KDE today. I used UNetbootin to put it on a 4 GB flash drive, then booted into a live session on the Compaq Presario CQ56-219WM notebook.

My immediate impression? Best-looking default KDE desktop I've seen so far.

Sabayon 9 comes with KDE 4.8.3. LibreOffice 3.5.3.2, and Chromium 19.0.1.084.46 (0).

I've been reading mostly good things about this Gentoo-based distro, but this is the first time I've taken a look at it. DistroWatch has a nice review on it this week, and you can find a couple of other reviews at LinuxUser and Muktware.

Looking forward to trying an installation!