Sabayon 11 with UEFI SecureBoot support

The Sabayon developers have released version 11 of the Gentoo-based Linux distribution. The 64-bit live images of Sabayon 11 can now boot and install on UEFI systems with Secure Boot enabled, as the Sabayon developers decided to adopt Matthew Garret's signed-shim. A SecureBoot key is in the /SecureBoot directory of the live media and can be used on initial booting, while a SecureBoot keypair is generated during installation and can then be added to the firmware's database, which allows users to sign their own binaries.

Sabayon 11 also includes the BumbleBee system, which works with NVIDIA's Optimus technology to switch between onboard Intel and offboard NVIDIA graphics hardware. Following the current trends, Sabayon now also includes MariaDB, alongside Google MySQL 5.1 and Oracle MySQL 5.5; the developers hope to switch to MariaDB 10.0 as the default MySQL implementation when a stable version of that is released.

As with any distribution refresh, there are updates; the kernel is now version 3.7.4, GNOME is 3.6.2, KDE is 4.9.5 (and 4.10 is "in the works") and LibreOffice is up to 3.6.3.2 (also with 4.0 soon). The MATE desktop is updated to 1.4 and XBMC 12 is also included. Now also in the Sabayon repositories is Steam for Linux, joining the almost 14,000 packages for each of the main architectures already available. There are also improvements for the Rigo graphical application browser and a rewrite for Equo, the command line package manager.

Sabayon is a rolling release distribution with the software kept constantly up to date. The developers have been adjusting the rolling model to make it "less painful and more predictable". With official releases quickly becoming stale, they have already introduced "daily" live media images. During Sabayon 11's release cycle they now plan to offer "semi-automatic monthly" releases too.

Sabayon is available in several versions from the many mirrors which carry it. The ISO images are labelled with "x86" to denote 32-bit and "amd64" to denote 64-bit support. The images are also tagged to show which desktop they provide; "G" for GNOME, "K" for KDE, "MATE" for the GNOME-2 desktop fork and "Xfce" for the Xfce desktop. There are also a range of other images. There is CoreCDX, a minimal install version with FluxBox, and HardenedServer, an Xfce-desktopped version with a Gentoo kernel built with all the hardening flags enabled. Finally, ServerBase and SpinBase offer the foundational images for creating server- or desktop-oriented Sabayon-based distributions.

(djwm)