# Introduction

We're once again here to announce the immediate availability of Sabayon 10 in all of its tier-1 flavours. If you really enjoyed Sabayon 9, this is just another step towards World domination (yay!). There you have it, shining at full brightness, for your home computer, your laptop, and your servers, virtualized or not. Linux Kernel 3.5.4 with BFQ iosched, GNOME 3.4.2, KDE 4.9 (4.9.1 available in days), Xfce 4.10, LibreOffice 3.6 are just some of the things you will find inside the box. Gentoo Hardened kernels, improved Rigo -- a new way of browsing and installing applications, more ZFS integration work, Mesa 9 stack, Amazon EC2 support, Infinality Freetype patches, and much more.

# Features

## 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 happen, 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.

## Support us

If you believe we've done a great job, please consider to tip us through our donation page. This is really important for us, this is our free time after all!

## It does not boot

What if your hardware does not boot the latest and greatest Sabayon 10? Here is a list of common tricks to make it happen, hopefully.

Q: I read "This kernel requires the following features not present on the CPU: pae. Unable to boot - please use a kernel appropriate for you CPU.". What should I do? A: Unfortunately, your CPU is one of the few modern 32bit CPUs that does not support 36bit Physical Address Extension. We stopped supporting non-PAE CPUs starting from Linux Kernel 3.4.

Q: I have a Radeon HD4000 and the UI does not boot, leaving me with a black screen. A: You may have hit a drm/driver conflict with vesafb. Try to remove the following boot parameters (press F5 to edit the boot arguments): vga=791 or splash=... or video=vesafb:ywrap,mtrr:3. Or try passing splash=off replacing the previous value.

# Download links

- Sabayon Mirrors Page
- Sabayon BitTorrent Tracker
- Join us on Facebook
- Join us on Google+
- Donate to Sabayon!

Please find the official file names and hashes below.