Some additions to KDE4

We are working on the next Sabayon 4.1 release and things are going well.

As you might know, this time we want to do things slightly different. Ironicly we always do things different. But this time we decided to work on 2 different DVD’s based on the previous succesfull release of liteMCE.

The G disc:

This will be allot like the liteMCE disc which features gnome as its desktopmanger.

The G disc doesn’t need much work. Since its mostly an updated packages/artwork version of liteMCE.

The K disc:

This would be the same thing as the G disc but with KDE 4.2.1 as its desktopmanager.

Now this one will take more time because we want to tackle some practical problems. We want to ship the K with the most pure KDE/Qt programs and we need to work out some of the artwork issues like GTK applications (e.g. firefox) that are looking ugly.

So i went looking and found a nice replacement for Gparted:

http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php/KDE+Partition+Manager?content=89595

This package is already available in entropy. Please note that its still marked as beta and on my system it took a while before it loaded up on my screen.

Another thing we wanted to add to the K disc is a nice little program that lets you edit the grub menu and even reinstall grub in case of an emergency.

The GRUB editor program is now in entropy.

http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php/KGRUBEditor?content=75442

Any further suggestions are welcome.

Entropy UGC

Ever since we launched the new website and implemented UGC (User Generated Content) in entropy it looks like it never came clear what this is all about. Let me try to put some light in the dark here and explain about the purpose about it.

We wanted to combine web 2.0 functionality with our packagemanager.
A user should be able to login into spritz and rate a package and further more, add some media to it so other users can see this using either spritz or directly from the web.

So what lxnay did was translate the phpbb functions into our own python api that would make interaction between forum and entropy UGC possible.

You might not have noticed it yet, but if you double click on a package in spritz this will open a new dialog presenting some more details about this package. How its build and when and more details you might never need to know.

Simply click on + add document here to add your own picture / howto / comment / youtube video to share with other users.

The same thing is possible using the webinterface, just go to

http://packages.sabayonlinux.org

Easy as pie i’d say.
Just use your forum account to login and share with others!

Creating a backup for entropy.

Entropy and its tools offer allot of things you might never guessed.

Lets take spritz and create a backup from our local client database. Its wise to make a backup of this client database every now and then because this holds all the information about your system installed packages.

Just hit “New Backup” and it will create a backup that we can use later in case of an emergency.

Running equo database backup will do the same thing.

I want to note that there are 2 databases that entropy uses.

• The online database that holds entries about every package you can install. This is the database that gets updated when you run “equo update”. If for whatever reason this database get damaged, or when you cannot seem to update it using equo update, you can simply overwrite it and download a fresh new one using equo update –force.

• The client database that holds everything you have installed on your system. When this gets corrupted OR removed you are screwed unless you have a very recent backup made as i explained above.

Now if for whatever reason the client database is removed/corrupt and you didn’t make any backup, there is one option that we can try to regenerate the client database.
Because we know from our online database what files belong to what package, we can scan the filesystem and poll the database and recreate our client database.

So if there is no way to get your things back togheter using a backup you can at the end of the line use our special escape: equo database resurrect

A sad day for the community

Dear friends,

Today we’ve learned that our friend mr. Bunz died.
Our thoughts are with his family and friends.

The man with the balloons that always made us smile is no more.

http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/112-10212008-1608461.html%27

The road to Sabayon 4.0

Our team is growing stronger and everybody is working hard to get things in shape. I think its like 2 months ago that we decided to write down an organisation structure in wich everybody invloved gets a place and its tasks.

We needed to make this step to get things done faster and work more efficient on the project.
A real important position in this all would be the desktop users voice. It was obvious to ask Kelly Schwartz (wolfden) to take this position (CCO – Chief Community Officer) and he accepted it.

Our CCO knows whats going on in the community, problems people run into and also things people would like in the distro or don’t. Our CCO now has a direct voice under Fabio and this means our intentions are to really make this distro suit perfect for our community.

Besides the CCO allot of positions are taken and some new people hooked up to the project, wich is great, but we still need more people on our development team. So if you think you can offer help in means of Bash/Python scripting or can help on the ebuilds in our overlay please contact us.

While i’m allready working on the 4.0 branch you might know that an interim release is planned. Sabayon 3.5.1 will be released soon and will diff 400+ package updates since sabayon 3.5 released. Also some other patches are applied to it.

So about 4.0, what can you expect?

KDE 4.1.2
Gnome 2.24
latest xorg (hopefully the AMD/ATI driver will be ready for it soon)
and allot more.

We also changed the chost on the 32bits version. So it will be i686. This means that each package needed to be recompiled and thus gets a revision in Entropy. In short this means that by the time you want to upgrade to 4.0 using Entropy, each package will be updated. On the amd64 4.0 branch this will not be necessary.

CrossOver Chromium

In addition to my previous post, my friend from Brasil pointed out that Codeweavers created a more elegant way to play with Google Chrome.

http://media.codeweavers.com/pub/crossover/chromium/install-cxchromium-0.9.0.sh

Enjoy!

Google chrome under Wine

While it still is beta, like anything from Google, it is possible to run Google chrome on Sabayon.

We need to download the installer first:
http://gpdl.google.com/chrome/install/149.29/chrome_installer.exe

Click to install it and notice that a desktop icon for Chrome is created. Now open up a terminal and edit this file.

nano Google\ Chrome.desktop

Edit the line so it looks like this:

Exec[$e]=env WINEPREFIX=”/home/joost/.wine” wine “C:\\windows\\profiles\\joost\\Local Settings\\Application Data\\Google\\Chrome\\Application\\chrome.exe” –new-http –in-process-plugins

As you can see i’ve added –new-http –in-process-plugins to that line (outside the quotes).

Now fire op Chrome from your desktop icon.
I noticed that on KDE the top panel overlaps, so might wanna drag it away to the side.

Happy hacking!

Source: http://www.myscienceisbetter.info/2008/09/install-google-chrome-on-linux-using-wine.html