Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Work on Sabayon, upstream and in Edubuntu

As one of our goals for the upcoming release of Edubuntu, we really wanted to get a working Sabayon to allow teachers and systems administrators to manage user profiles. Sabayon's been in a buggy state in Ubuntu for a bit, so I decided to buckle down and start learning the codebase.

Federico, who has already come to LTSP users aid by working on his excellent patches to Firefox to reduce pixmap usage, once again stepped up to the plate and answered my many silly questions and accepted several patches from me. As well, his work on getting Sabayon working with Xephyr has basically turned Sabayon into a useful tool again.

I feel that this tool is such an important one, not only for regular desktop users, but especially for LTSP users, that I'm planning on becoming a permanent upstream contributor. Sorry, Federico, looks like you're stuck with me!

I'm not saying all the bugs have been beaten out of it quite yet, but it's gone from a piece of software that wouldn't even boot before, to one in which you can edit and apply profiles.

And today, thanks to stgraber's help, it landed in Karmic.

Hooray for profiles!