Technology Tales

Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology

A way to get Rigo working again in Sabayon

23rd October 2013

After having Sabayon running on a PC until it came to pieces after an attempted version upgrade, I went away from the Linux distro for a while and Linux Mint now runs on the aforementioned machine. It only was a certain curiosity that got me installing it into a virtual machine on VirtualBox to see if my command line method of keeping the system up to date was the cause or whether rolling or partially-rolling distros have a certain fragility that is not seen in their discrete release counterparts.

Recently that ran into a hitch, the Sabayon package manager Rigo failed to start up for me. After waiting to see if it sorted itself on its own, I looked into returning to those command line ways and that line of enquiry led me to a method of restoring Rigo’s functionality from Sabayon’s wiki page on the underlying Entropy. The first step was to issue a command to become root:

su

That needed the appropriate password and the next command issued updated Sabayon’s repositories:

equo update

Once that had done its thing, it was time to install new versions of Entropy and Rigo:

equo install entropy rigo

With that complete, it was time to exit the root session with the exit command. Then, it was time to try running Rigo and it worked as expected. Any thoughts of adding in the superseded Sulfur (Rigo’s predecessor) were banished on seeing that success.

Installing the Cinnamon Desktop Environment on Sabayon Linux

26th January 2013

During the week, I did an update on my Sabayon system and GNOME 3.6 came on board without to much of a bother. There was no system meltdown or need for an operating system re-installation. However, there was one matter that rankled: adding and updating extensions from extensions. gnome.org was impossible. The process would create a new folder in ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/  but not fill it with anything at all. Populating from another my Ubuntu GNOME Remix 12.10 machine didn’t seem to achieve the needful and I am left wondering if it is down to the version of GNOME Shell being 3.6.2. However, even adding an entry for the current version of GNOME Shell to metadata.json for one plugin didn’t appear to do what I wanted so resolving this issue needs further enquiry.

In the meantime, I added the Cinnamon desktop environment using the following command and will be using that from now on. If the GNOME Shell extension issue ever gets sorted I may move back but there is no rush. GNOME 3.8 sounds like it’s bringing an interesting option that makes use of the approach Linux Mint took for version 12 of that distribution and I can await that, especially if it avoids the need for adding extension on a personal basis like now.

sudo equo update && sudo equo install cinnamon

With the installation completed by the above command, it was a matter of logging out and choosing the Cinnamon entry (there is a 2D version too) from the session dropdown menu on the login screen to get it going. Then, it was a matter of tweaking Cinnamon to my heart’s content. Getting a two panel layout required logging out and in again as well as choosing the appropriate setting in the Cinnamon Panel options tab. Next, I decided to check on what themes are available at cinnamon.linuxmint.org before settling on Cinnamint 1.6. It all feels very comfortable apart from not having an automatically growing list of workspaces that are a default offering in GNOME Shell. That goes against the design principles of Cinnamon though so only hopes of someone making an extension that does that are left.

Setting up MySQL on Sabayon Linux

27th September 2012

For quite a while now, I have offline web servers for doing a spot of tweaking and tinkering away from the gaze of web users that visit what I have on there. Therefore, one of the tests that I apply to any prospective main Linux distro is the ability to set up a web server on there. This is more straightforward for some than for others. For Ubuntu and Linux Mint, it is a matter of installing the required software and doing a small bit of configuration. My experience with Sabayon is that it needs a little more effort than this and I am sharing it here for the installation of MySQL.

The first step is too install the software using the commands that you find below. The first pops the software onto the system while second completes the set up. The --basedir option is need with the latter because it won’t find things without it. It specifies the base location on the system and it’s /usr in my case.

sudo equo install dev-db/mysql
sudo /usr/bin/mysql_install_db --basedir=/usr

With the above complete, it’s time to start the database server and set the password for the root user. That’s what the two following commands achieve. Once your root password is set, you can go about creating databases and adding other users using the MySQL command line

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql start
mysqladmin -u root password ‘password’

The last step is to set the database server to start every time you start your Sabayon system. The first command adds an entry for MySQL to the default run level so that this happens. The purpose of the second command is check that this happened before restarting your computer to discover if it really happens. This procedure also is needed for having an Apache web server behave in the same way so the commands are worth having and even may have a use for other services on your system. ProFTP is another that comes to mind, for instance.

sudo rc-update add mysql default
sudo rc-update show | grep mysql

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