New Enlightenment snapshot in Entropy

Allot of work was done recently to work down the reverse dependency list on HAL.
http://lists.sabayon.org/pipermail/devel/2011-February/006269.html

One of the bigger problems was Enlightenment. Some time ago we moved to using the EFL packages from Portage to base our Enlightenment version on. I wanted to move to a more maintainable and more “stable” Enlightenment so we could work out a spin for Enlightenment.

This all was just fine until it became an item on the todo list for HAL removal. After a short chitchat wit upstream developers I quickly realized it could take some time before I could actually be HAL independent if I wanted to maintain things like I did. So I cut the knot and

- moved the live ebuilds from Vapiers enlightenment overlay to ours
- key-worded them for ~amd64 and ~x86
- fixed some issues (automagic dependency on edb pulling in an old gtk+ version ZOMG!, make the ebuilds use virtual/jpeg)

And there I had it. The whole thing compiled pushed into our testing repository tested it and now we have it in our main repository!

If you already had Enlightenment installed, simply install the -9999 version updates. (-9999 in portage means this is a live ebuild, all sources are taken from the trunk directly and not taken from a released version tarball upstream created). After you installed the updates you want to get ridd of edb since it is not used anymore.

Simply run : equo remove edb --deep

This command removes edb and all its deps that are not needed anymore (most likely it will also remove the old gtk+ version)

About gtk+, I noticed that gtk apps in Enlightenment look a bit “ugly” at first. This is because the GNOME Settings Daemon is not running. You can make it run automatically when you enable it in the Enlightenment settings panel. -> Apps -> Startup Applications. Click on GNOME settings daemon -> Click add and click on apply. Then logout and login again and there you have it.

Last but not least. I noticed that some older themes I had laying around didn’t work that well. if you are looking for cool enlightenment themes go to this website: http://exchange.enlightenment.org/theme

Have fun!

Getting rid of Catalyst

Lately I’m getting really annoyed with the ATI drivers and the system instability it gave me. I posted my problems on our mailinglist but what can I do about it? Not much.

So I decided to take a look, once again, to the state of the Opensource ATI driver and made it work with the stock Entropy packages we have.

Let me warn you that if you are happy with current fglrx, don’t change it. If it ain’t broken don’t fix it!
Now if you are a bit of an experienced user and know how to revert some steps here is a small guide how to make things work for you.

Step 1: Get rid of ATI drivers
equo remove ati-drivers

Step 2: Let the kernel load the radeon module
Edit /etc/conf.d/modules and add modules=”radeon” at the end of the file

Step 3: Remove some kernel parameters from the grub menu
Edit /etc/default/sabayon-grub and remove the console=tty1 quiet splash= and vga= completely.

Step 4: Add a custom parameter that enables KMS (Kernel Mode Setting)
Edit /etc/default/grub and add radeon.modeset=1 to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT variable

Step 5: Regenerate your grub.cfg file:
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Step 6: Use “ati” in /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and change “fglrx” to “ati” in the Driver section of the file
Now reboot.

Optionally you can also play around with the new Gallium3d implementations. To change things to use gallium3d instead of the older mesa you can use the command: eselect mesa list to show how things are currently set.

In my case: eselect mesa set r600 2
Would set it to use gallium3d

Some reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium3D

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_mode-setting

First aid: I broke my Entropy

If you for whatever reason managed to break Entropy (equo) and aren’t able to update / upgrade / install any program using Entropy, you are screwed most likely because you could not update Entropy or reinstall equo to fix it.

It is very unlikely that you get into a situation like this but I’ve seen the most weird problems people get into and it could happen to you too! You install upgrades on your laptop and the battery went down in the middle of process, the cat pushed a button in the powerbox and the lights went out..etc

The alternative to fix Entropy is to install it using Portage. Here are the steps to take:

1. Sync the sabayon overlay:
layman -s sabayon

OR simply add the overlay in case you didn’t have it yet

layman -a sabayon

2. Install Entropy directly from the overlay:
emerge entropy equo --nodeps

3. Inform Entropy about the changes you made:
equo rescue spmsync

5. Reinstall Entropy with Entropy
equo update && equo install entropy equo

Update a fresh 5.4 Installation

Since the release of 5.4 many many things changed. As you might have noticed, the Sabayon Linux project is moving fast and many updates are generated every day.

Because we are now a rolling distro and moved some things into the maintenance scope, things that would normally ONLY get updated on a new branch, we had to resolve an issue that some Gnome users ran into. In fact the problem was not a specific Gnome issue but a distro wide problem.

When I bumped glibc because a security reason, Fabio already warned me about problems that could affect our users but we decided to go ahead.

What we learned is that in such a case, glibc on the user end should ALWAYS be installed first. And Fabio wouldn’t be Fabio if he didn’t foresee the need for such a feature and this was already possible to do for some time now. So we moved glibc to the special list and there you have it on a fresh install:

equo update && equo upgrade:

It now wants to first install glibc! You ofcourse should do this (you have no choice using upgrade)

When this is installed you want to install the latest entropy version first:

equo install entropy –relaxed

Finally you can install all the updates.

Remember that Sabayon 5.4 shipped with the 2.6.35 kernel version. If you want the 2.6.36 kernel version (or later whenever it is available in Entropy) you should manually install it. Please refer to our wiki on how to do this.

Why do we bump just to bump?

In my daily maintenance routine I tend to throw an emerge -uav world against the sabayon trees and see what packages can be bumped. I also check http://www.gentoo-portage.com to see what is new. In this routine 90% off all things I bump for Entropy it is done manually writing each emerge -av command by hand.
Since I trust Gentoo developers for doing a good job within their own little expertise and interest, I kinda trust each package bump makes sense. If it is either some revision bump because there was some LD flags to respect, a fix for –as-needed or simple another minor thing I just bump them. Even though on the binary end this would not make any difference for the user experience I just do it.

However this workflow sometimes leads to some stupid breakages because somebody thought it was a great idea to bump some lib that in fact is there for a reason. Some things in the Portage tree simply are there because some, or maybe one, of the atoms in the tree need them. There are numerous examples I ran into lately but here is one off them:

In my daily routine, some while back I bumped net-libs/enet. Not a big deal really. However this seemed to break games-action/supertuxkart and my tools could not detect this breakage. Otherwise I would obviously reverted this update. I went looking into some history and I realized that only games-action/supertuxkart ,games-rpg/egoboo and games-puzzle/enigma actually need net-libs/enet within the Portage tree, so why was this package bumped anyway? Not because it was needed for one of its parent atoms , no, because some user on the gentoo bugzilla requested this atom (remember only needed so far by 3 atoms) to be updated because “there was a newer version”. http://bugs.gentoo.org/325809 (just an example, do not shoot anybody for this!)

Somebody requested without any motivation this package to be updated and without question this was done. This all leads to atoms currently in Portage to mall function, fail to compile, etc. Later this all was corrected by Gentoo QA team where they slotted the enet version.

So what happens next is that users notice this when they install one off the games and it doesn’t work? They file a bug to Sabayon, or a Gentoo user files a bug to the Gentoo bugzilla. A bug wrangler needs to check the bug is valid enough and assign it to a herd/maintainer. The maintainer then discovers the unwanted enet bump and got to do all the work to block the newer version. All that kinda work because somebody thought it would be nice to bump a library/piece off software.

If users request such a version bump do not be scared to ask for a motivation.
It is nice to be bleeding edge, but really uncool to fall off the cliff just to look cool.

Flash and pulseaudio resolved

Earlier I posted a dirty hack how to get the sound going again with flash on 64bits.

Now we have www-plugins/adobe-flash-10.1.53.64-r11 in the repositories with a cure for that.
If you did follow my previous post on how to get it working with mozilla-firefox, you should undo that (remove the libflashplayer.so from ~/.mozilla/plugins )

equo update && equo install www-plugins/adobe-flash-10.1.53.64-r11

Now you should check if you have /etc/asound.conf with the following contents:
pcm.!default {
type pulse
}

ctl.!default {
type pulse
}

Reboot and all should be fine again.

Zip compression on the linux shell

Just as a note to myself and maybe helpful to others.

To compress all files in zip file in a directory:
zip test.zip *.*
creates:
-rw-r--r-- 1 joost joost 111M Jul 21 14:23 test.zip

If you want to split up the zip file because it is a bit too big (111MB) we can use the zipsplit command.
Lets pass the -t parameter to first let it explain what it would do:

joost@xbox-360 ~/Desktop/moos $ zipsplit -tn 10000000 test.zip
12 zip files would be made (100% efficiency)

ooh yes I wants that!
joost@xbox-360 ~/Desktop/moos $ zipsplit -n 10000000 test.zip
12 zip files will be made (100% efficiency)
creating: test01.zip
creating: test02.zip
creating: test03.zip
creating: test04.zip
creating: test05.zip
creating: test06.zip
creating: test07.zip
creating: test08.zip
creating: test09.zip
creating: test10.zip
creating: test11.zip
creating: test12.zip

And there you have it.

Flash and sound after recent flash update.

Well due recent changes I noticed that using flash on firefox was hijacking the sound on my system.
If you aren’t a careless internet surfer and still want to use the latest amd64 flash version that didn’t have the sound problems you can try this.

mkdir ~/.mozilla/plugins

then download this flash release.
Extract libflashplayer.so into the directory we just created and restart firefox.

Some other people say they have benefit by setting an environmental variable but that didn’t work for me.
I’m not sure if the issue is only related to x86_64 yet.

Some updates

A few posts back I posted about setting up your own spin. Things got moving quickly and we decided to overhaul the way we maintain our iso’s server-side.

Sabayon 5.4 will have everything based on the SpinBase iso and all applications on top off this will be placed in sets. A KDE set is going to be written soon.

A first result of the reorganization are the LXDE and XFCE spins released today!

Some important recent changes:

- On amd64 we moved to 32bits flash.
If you have a problem with it consider reinstalling nspluginwrapper. I know it is not the most elegant solution, but keeping users with a potential security risk was worse. And upstream Adobe did NOT provide a 64bits version.

- ATI-drivers 10.6 problems
Due a bug in the new ati-drivers that only affects people with a default xorg.conf (most off you) the light went out and X would die with a segfault. Check out this bug report on debian. As a result we decided to mask 10.6.

Release Name Shuffling (CoreCD/SpinBase/CoreCDX)

(this post was made by Mitch Harder on the development mailing list)

I want to bring everybody up to speed on some name shuffling we are
doing with our “Core” releases.

CoreCDX is now our primary public “Core” release. Users who want to
install a minimal Sabayon Linux version should use this version with
the graphical installer.

The CoreCD has been renamed “SpinBase”. It’s primary purpose is to be
our internal “Base” for building up automated “Spin” releases. It
will be publicly available to anyone who wants it (primarily
developers and molecule users), but will not be advertised as a
“release”.

The upstream maintainers of Anaconda have drastically cut back the
functionality of the Anaconda installer with respect to console-based
text installation.

The graphical installer is working great, and has updated some
capabilities to handle new hardware. But the console-based text
installer has lost the ability to custom partition an installation,
and is primarily directed at installing to an empty disk. Inattentive
users who are used to the previous text-based installer run the hazard
of overwriting their entire hard disk.

During this release cycle, we’ve been struggling with how to handle
this change in our installer. We’ve developed CoreCDX as a release
intended for end users who want a minimal Sabayon Linux system with a
robust, easy-to-use installer.

The CoreCD is still extremely important to Sabayon as we evolve our
“Spin” releases. But it has become of marginal value to end users due
to the limitations of the text-based installer. And, the text-based
installer as it exists now will confuse users and perhaps lead to lose
of data for those expecting it to function like previous releases.

So we have renamed the “CoreCD” to “SpinBase” since the name was too
close to CoreCDX, and would lead to confusion. As previously noted,
it will be publicly available, but not promoted as a “release”.

So, to summarize:
(1) CoreCDX is our new ‘minimal’ release for users who want a
stripped down Sabayon installation.
(2) SpinBase is a release primarily directed at developers who want
to use molecule, and also an important internal release.