Sabayon 13.04 introduces experimental systemd support

The Gentoo-based Sabayon distribution is leaving "the 90s and VHS" behind "once and for all" with its latest monthly update. Sabayon 13.04 introduces experimental support for the systemd startup system, which is set to replace OpenRC for the distribution "in the following months". The development team has also migrated its source code repositories to GitHub to make it easier for other developers to contribute to the project.

Sabayon 13.04 is the first release since the project has changed its release cadence and, to reflect that, also its version numbering scheme. The change in the distribution's release cycle goes a step further than what was announced with the release of Sabayon 11 in February. The new monthly releases are automatically generated and tested by the distribution's build server network. The developers label the new system as "an extreme, yet reliable, rolling release model."

The developers now consider the distribution's support for UEFI and Secure Boot that was introduced with Sabayon 11 to be production ready, and they have managed to get rid of all bugs reported against this during the development cycle leading up to this release. The distribution now also mounts its /tmp directory on a small tmpfs partition with the nodev, noexec and nosuidfor options set for added security. The developers say that this can cause problems with a small number of programs, but that these problems should be reported upstream.

Sabayon 13.04 is the latest monthly image generated from the distribution's rolling release model. 32- and 64-bit versions with the GNOME, MATE, KDE and Xfce desktops are available from the distribution's mirror servers. A server image and base versions that are meant for advanced users are also available. The mirror servers also include a detailed change log that lists all changes in this release.

(fab)