Sabayon: User profiles made simple

What is Sabayon?

Sabayon is a system administration tool to manage GNOME desktop settings. Sabayon provides a sane way to edit GConf defaults and GConf mandatory keys: the same way you edit your desktop. Sabayon launches profiles in an Xnest window. Any changes you make in the Xnest window are saved back to the profile file, which can then be applied to user's accounts.

More screenshots and a step by step example are available from Seth Nickell blog about sabayon 0.12.

Features

Currently Sabayon is limited to the creation and update of user preference profiles. It does not deal with the very large problem of actually populating target system with those preferences.

Supported configuration backend

So far Sabayon supports complete files and the configuration format for:

We are looking into or planning on adding support for the following:

More documentation

Contributed documentation is welcome:

Helping with Sabayon

Triage Bugzilla

Use this link for looking at open bugs with Sabayon. Please make sure the new and unconfirmed bugs conform the the bug reporting guidelines laid out in the testing section.

The GNOME Bugsquad has a good triage guide for people new to bugzilla and GNOME. Read up on that before doing any triage work with bugzilla and if you know that please also read our bug reporting guidelines in the testing section.

Distribution Support

Sabayon needs as much testing and widespread distribution as possible in order to become the default preference management tool for sysadmins in GNOME, replacing the ad hoc solutions that people currently use.

Ask your favorite distribution to package Sabayon and use it.

Testing Sabayon

Getting From CVS

To get the very latest copy of Sabayon you'll need to pull it from CVS. Here's how you'll do it.

    export CVSROOT=':pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome'
    cvs login
    [press enter for blank password]
    cvs -z3 co sabayon
    cd sabayon
    

Getting From Package

Download the latest source package from the Sabayon package directory: http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/sabayon/. Then untar the files like this:

    tar -zxvf sabayon-0.1.0.tar.gz
    cd sabayon-0.1.0
    

Building From Source

Assuming you've changed into the Sabayon source directory from either a package or CVS you now want to start the build.

    ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/local
    make
    make install (sudo make install may work for you)
    

Environment

Check the README file, to test sabayon you need a number of packages to be up to date. This is checked by the RPM upon installation. You also need a sabayon user defined like:

sabayon:x:50140:99:Sabayon user:/var/sabayon:/sbin/nologin

The RPM post install scripts uses the following command to create this specific user:

/usr/sbin/useradd -c "Sabayon user" -d /var/sabayon -g nobody -s /sbin/nologin sabayon

You may need to do this by hand or in you package to have a working installation of sabayon

Testing

Now that you have Sabayon installed try it by launching sabayon as root and create new profiles and edit them. Don't forget to save the session before quitting to have the profile updated. Check the step by step example available from Seth Nickell blog about sabayon 0.12.

Reporting Bugs

When reporting bugs about Sabayon it is most helpful to explain the sequence of events you did to generate the bug. If we can reproduce the bug it is of course easier to fix.

Report bugs for sabayon to GNOME Bugzilla under the Sabayon product.

Getting More Help

The GNOME web site has lots of materials for helping you build packages from source, see the developer site for more information about CVS and autogen and building. If you have any other questions feel free to direct them to IRC or the mailing list.

Developing Sabayon

The AUTHORS file has the current people in charge of the Sabayon project maintenance and development.

Getting Started

If you'd like to start working on Sabayon see the Testing section for how to get the latest CVS sources of Sabayon.

Getting in Touch

Sabayon hackers use the mailing list and irc channel #sabayon on the server irc.gnome.org for keeping in touch and discussing issues regarding the project.

The TODO List

Sabayon has a TODO list that should be updated frequently describing the work that the developers would like to undertake and will gladly accept patches for.