Sabayon 5.1: An open mind is a beautiful mind

I noticed on Wolfden’s Blog that Sabayon 5.1 comes with some major changes to the Entropy package management system and that, if I wanted to keep my system up to day I needed to point my repositories.conf to the current URLs.

Which is easy enough:

1. as user type su and enter root password
2. cd /etc/entropy/
3. mv /etc/entropy/repositories.conf /etc/entropy/repositories.old
4. wget http://wolf911.us/sabayon/files/repositories.conf
5. equo update –force

And then I started installing the updates. This all went smoothly – even when my internet connection broke halfway through due to a completely unrelated issue (an unplugged wireless router, if you must know).

My first thought was: Lordy, that’s a nice desktop. They really have excelled themselves with the artwork this time around.

No configuration changes were needed, so I started looking at the updated applications. I should probably insert a disclaimer here as I haven’t updated everything yet. There are a number of applications installed by default that I don’t use, so I shall be uninstalling some of these rather than upgrading them. That said, my most commonly used apps are now at the latest and greatest version, and some of the differences are quite noticable.

Gwibber, the Gnome microblogging client is now up to version 2.29.92.1. This is an application that, when it was first released, I really liked. It managed a near perfect balance between being lightweight, unobtrusive and functional – I could leave ir running on the right hand side of my screen and see all the updates and only the updates. Those days, unfortunately, appear to be on the way out and the application is taking up ever more of my screen. I will continue to stick with it, however, because there is nothing else in Gnomeland to touch it for functionality – and I have come to really like the fact that I can follow and post multiple accounts from a single window.

Liferea, the Linux Feed Reader is now at 1.7.3 and is still far and away the best news aggregator out there. I haven’t noticed any obvious changes, but the software is still as powerful and flexible as ever.

Grisbi, on the other hand, dows look very different. This home finance management system is at 0.6.0rc2 and the good folks behind it have really tidied up the interface. Everything is so much easier to find now.

I do, of course, use plenty of other applications but for the rest I either haven’t played around with them yet or the changes weren’t immediately obvious to me.

Overall, though, Sabayon is looking very nice, and very stable, indeed. The provisional release date for 5.2 is end of March or early April and I’m looking forward to it.

Update: And now Sabayon 5.2 has rolled along. Everything is installed and is still looking very nice indeed.