Sabayon Linux SpinBase Changelog

What's new in Sabayon Linux SpinBase 14.01

Dec 21, 2013
  • Linux Kernel 3.12.5 with BFQ iosched, updated external ZFS filesystem support, GNOME 3.10.3, KDE 4.11.4, Xfce 4.10, LibreOffice 4.1.3, UEFI SecureBoot support for 64 bit images (with bundled UEFI shell), systemd as default init system, a greatly improved version of the Entropy package manager supporting concurrent activities (like parallel installation of applications) and PackageKit 0.8.x support with backend parallelization enabled. Last but not really least, the integration of Steam and a new install profile called Steam Big Picture mode (also improperly known as SteamBox on my blog) that turns your computer into a powerful Linux gaming machine.
  • These are just some of the awesome things you will find inside the box.

New in Sabayon Linux SpinBase 13.04 (May 1, 2013)

  • Linux Kernel 3.8.8 (3.8.10 available through updates, 3.9 available in hours) with BFQ iosched and ZFS, GNOME 3.6.3, KDE 4.10.2, MATE 1.6 (thanks to infirit), Xfce 4.10, LibreOffice 4.0, production ready UEFI (and SecureBoot) support and experimental systemd support (including openrc boot speed improvements) are just some of the things you will find inside the box.

New in Sabayon Linux SpinBase 11 (Feb 16, 2013)

  • Reliably Rolling:
  • As many of you know, Sabayon is a rolling distribution with some tweaks to the model to make the experience less painful and more predictable. This also mean that our official releases (or snapshots) are becoming stale very quickly, which is a reason why we have “daily” live media images available as well. Now, we want to take it further and, in the near future, offer semi-automatic monthly (or bi-monthly) releases. During this release cycle and the upcoming one, the focus has been and will be on distribution-wide continuous integration and testing. This also means that your contribution in terms of feedback, bug reporting and donations is going to be even more important for us!
  • EFI, UEFI and UEFI SecureBoot:
  • Starting from Sabayon 11, all the x86_64 live images can boot and install on {U,}EFI only systems through GRUB bootloader. While we debate the way SecureBoot is implemented and its key management governed, we decided to make Sabayon bootable on systems where SecureBoot is enabled, through shim-signed, by Matthew Garrett. The process is simple: at the first live boot, you will be asked to enroll the Sabayon SecureBoot key, which is available in the “/SecureBoot” directory on the live media. However, in order to give you full control of your system, during the installation a new and personal SecureBoot keypair will be generated (and put into /BOOT/EFI/sabayon/enroll-this.cer). This means two things: you must also enroll this new key at the first boot after install and you will be able to sign your own binaries without depending on any third-parties (including us).
  • To learn more about SecureBoot in Sabayon, also read this blog post.
  • NVIDIA Optimus and Bumblebee support:
  • Sabayon 11 gained out of the box support for NVIDIA Optimus through Bumblebee (and bbswitch). Optimus systems are automatically detected and configured on your behalf if a NVIDIA GPU, an Intel GPU and NVIDIA proprietary drivers are installed.
  • Tons of updates and new packages:
  • As always, the amount of software updates is huge, and you can search for your favorite software through our web interface. Here are some worth a mention: all our Linux kernels (server, desktop, hardened, ec2, arm) at the time of this writing, have been updated to 3.7.4, GNOME has been updated to 3.6.2, KDE to 4.9.5 (and 4.10.1 is in the works), LibreOffice to 3.6.3.2 (and 4.0 will arrive soon), MATE saw its 1.4 release and XBMC 12 is finally here. Last but not least is Steam! Yes, we now have it in our repositories as well.
  • The Sabayon repositories have now reached almost 14000 packages available for each of the main architectures currently supported (i686, x86_64). This has been made possible by our new internal continuous building tools (Matter and Cosmos), and your donations of course.
  • Rigo improvements, Equo rewrite:
  • Rigo, the Google-style graphical application browser, received a tremendous set of small but important speed and usability improvements thanks to your feedback. For example, a whole new set of keyboard accelerators has been implemented: CTRL+F for switching to the search bar, CTRL+M to load the preferences menu and CTRL+P to move the focus to the results list area.
  • For those of you who love Equo more, it may be interesting to know that the whole Equo codebase has been rewritten from scratch and the old stinky code that was around since 2007 has been eventually thrown away. While the command interface is still the same, you will be able to realize that some new features have appeared here and there, and most importantly, that now every equo sub-command has built-in support for bash completion and man pages. Fore more details about the new Equo, have a look at this blog post.
  • Free all the MySQLs:
  • Three MySQL flavors are now available in our repositories, and I personally feel quite proud of this: Google MySQL 5.1, Oracle MySQL 5.5 and MariaDB 5.5. We expect to migrate to MariaDB as the default MySQL implementation once version 10.0 is released as stable.

New in Sabayon Linux SpinBase 10 (Sep 17, 2012)

  • GNOME 2, no wait, MATE:
  • · The Sabayon/Gentoo MATE overlay, available on GitHub, rapidly gained a lot of interest among Sabayon, Gentoo developers and final users. Many people wanted GNOME 2 back and there you have it! We are more than happy to serve MATE to all our users and officially support it starting from now. Hence, Sabayon 10 MATE is now available on mirrors! Special thanks go to Joost Ruis (joost_op), Steev Klimaszewski (steev) and others.
  • Hardened Server:
  • · While Sabayon 9 saw the introduction of Gentoo Hardened features for system packages, Sabayon 10 goes a bit further by also providing an X.Org friendly hardened kernel based on the Gentoo Hardened patchset. All this can be found inside the HardenedServer ISO images for both i686 and x86_64 architectures. Another difference between the ServerBase ISO image and HardenedServer is that the latter features X.Org, Open Source drivers and our beloved graphical installer.
  • Amazon EC2:
  • · Running Sabayon on Amazon EC2 is more than a necessity for us. It's how we implement our failover disaster recovery plan. And why not making our EC2-ready kernels, and semi-official AMIs, available to our users as well? If you are interested in trying out Sabayon on Amazon EC2, now you can do it! Our AMIs are available in the EU (Ireland) Region at this time and you can read more about it at Fabio Erculiani's blog.
  • Linux 3.5.4 + Fusion patches:
  • · So far, our Fusion patchset has been almost completely merged into our default kernel, with the exception of Tuxonice, which doesn't provide same-day kernel patches (and our users know that we're kernel junkies). However, the most interesting piece of iosched ever released is now the default one in all our kernels and it's performing great. Of course we're talking about the BFQ iosched written by Paolo Valente.
  • Mesa 9, drm stack, KMS:
  • · Mesa 9 is not out yet, but you can get a taste of it in Sabayon 10 already, which is shipping with a 2012-08-31 snapshot of Mesa 9 and updated libdrm and drivers stack. Out of the box Kernel-Mode-Setting experience has been improved for Intel and Matrox video cards as well, while due to conflicts with fglrx, radeon KMS still requires some scripty help (but this will be addressed once Linux 3.6 is out). Please have a look at our footnotes if you have problems booting your system on AMD hardware.
  • ZFS, Grub 2.00:
  • · Starting from Sabayon 10 kernels (and 3.5 kernels available in repositories), ZFS is loaded earlier during the boot process, enabling users to boot their system directly from a ZFS filesystem (and use swap through ZFS as well). Grub 2.00 introduced libzfs support as well. However, our installer does not support ZFS out of the box yet. Special thanks go to Richard Yao for having followed the integration process closely enough with upstream for us.
  • New udev, kmod stack:
  • · As many other distributions, we were tempted by systemd to the point that we made it easier to migrate to it through Portage (and you can do that as well, with some trickery). This required a new udev-systemd snapshot and the migration to kmod, from module-init-tools. Our team, more precisely Joost Ruis, decided to benchmark OpenRC (our current init system) against Systemd and the results were a bit disappointing. While Systemd has proved to be faster, our real world scenarios simulation showed that the difference is well below 8 seconds for the boot process. Does this justify the move towards a less-tested and for many controversial technology? Not yet, our boot is fast enough. Do the average people restart their system more than 5 times a day? We don't think so.
  • KDE 4.9, GNOME 3.4.2, Xfce 4.10.0:
  • · As it always happens, all the main Desktop Environments have been updated to their latest stable releases. They now look even better on LCD screens thanks to the integration of the Infinality patches, read below.
  • LibreOffice 3.6:
  • · While we love to provide almost-same-day support for new stable kernel releases, we also love to bump LibreOffice once a new major release is out. Enjoy the latest and greatest LibreOffice release to date. Thanks to scarabeus for providing outstanding ebuilds all the time.
  • Infinality:
  • · Many of you already knew about Infinality, awesome stuff we couldn't leave out anymore. Special thanks go to Ben de Groot (yngwin)!
  • Entropy Package Library and Rigo:
  • · During the last months, Entropy went through intensive memory consumption profiling and subsequent optimization (without sacrificing performance). The outcome is that Entropy is now from 3 to 4 times smaller in memory during previously heavy memory operations caused by set intersections and differences. Python deficiencies in terms of memory allocation due to fragmentation are no longer a problem. Rigo, our new Application Browser, gained a lot more features, like Application Groups browsing, Installed Applications browsing, Easy Repository Management, One-click Download Mirrors optimization, Real-time, Live Install Queue management, Improved Multi-Seat support and many other minor improvements that make users happy.
  • XZ Compression:
  • · All our ISO images have been switched from Gzip to XZ compression, becoming from 15 to 20% smaller (with the exception of CoreCDX).
  • Other features and bugfixes:
  • · It is always hard to track down all the features that we incrementally introduced during this cycle and most of the times it does not make sense to list them in the propaganda notes here (eheh). However, one nice and small feature worth a mention is the ability to sanity check your Live media (whether it is USB or DVD doesn't matter) through the Live boot menu.

New in Sabayon Linux SpinBase 9 (Jun 11, 2012)

  • Gentoo Hardened:
  • A lot of effort has been put into securing the base system packages, introducing the Gentoo Hardened profile into the Sabayon ecosystem (yet in a gradual way, hardened kernel might come in the near future).
  • Rigo
  • During this cycle, Rigo, a new concept of minimalistic and easy to use Application Browser User Interface, has seen the light, replacing Sulfur as the default Entropy GUI. In a few words, Rigo is a search-based, modern, modular and scalable application for browsing Sabayon packages. It composed by RigoDaemon, which is the dbus system service, a Gtk3 UI and a UI-independent library. It includes 99% of the features people are supposed to find in a tool that can be used to find, update and remove applications, but the team is not done yet and would love to get some feedback about it.
  • ZFS:
  • Another outstanding feature is the ZFS tech-preview level support: due to license conflicts, our team was not allowed to provide a truly (including the Installer part) out-of-the-box support, but still, if you're interested in trying out an amazing filesystem like ZFS is, it's going to be straightforward after install!.
  • PAE
  • Talking about x86 (32bit) Sabayon, our team decided that it was time to switch to a PAE kernel, to allow systems stuck with this ancient architecture to support more than 4GB of RAM.
  • More bug fixes:
  • Besides the huge, and usual load of updates several minor bugs have been fixed.

New in Sabayon Linux SpinBase 8 (Feb 8, 2012)

  • The first and best way to try a Gentoo-based Linux distribution at its full power, with all working out-of-the-box and no compilation needed at all
  • The first Extreme-Rolling Release distribution, with automated repository package version bumping, thanks to Entropy Matter ebuild tracker
  • Faster, cleaner and more evolved than any other rolling distro out there: we work hard to bring you the most stable rolling release experience
  • Keep up-to-date your system in minutes while maintaining full Gentoo Portage compatibility
  • Focusing on performance: GCC 4.6 with Graphite Loop Transformation infrastructure and Link Time Optimizations enabled
  • Always up-to-date Linux Kernel 3.2 (and experimental "Fusion" Kernels available in repositories)
  • Providing extra Server-oriented Linux kernels (OpenVZ, Vserver, Generic Server)
  • Natively supporting the btrfs filesystem (besides ext4, aufs, and others)
  • Transform Sabayon into an full-featured HTPC Operating System (Media Center) using XBMC 10.1 (11.0 available soon)
  • GNOME 3.2.2 Visual Environment
  • KDE 4.7.4 Desktop Environment (4.8.0 available in a few days)
  • Improved Xfce 4.8 out-of-the-box experience (for those missing GNOME2)
  • Improved LibreOffice integration, updated to 3.4.4
  • Migrated to libav as ffmpeg replacement
  • Migrated to Java 7 and Subversion 1.7
  • Cinnamon and Razor Qt available in repositories
  • Entropy Framework (Package Manager, Web Services) updated to 1.0_rc86, consolidating stability and performance
  • Support for IME and non-roman fonts at install time
  • Support for non-latin languages at install time
  • More than 12000 packages available for x86_64, i686
  • ARMv7 versions already available, with more than 2000 packages ready to be installed