https://lxnaydesign.net/ Long-form histories of Linux distributions — how they started, how they ended, and what still runs. Written from release notes, mailing lists and archives, not from memory. Published at lxnaydesign.net, which was the home of RR4/RR64 Linux, later Sabayon, in 2005 and 2006. en Zane Hitchcox editor@lxnaydesign.net (Zane Hitchcox) editor@lxnaydesign.net (Zane Hitchcox) Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Hand-written https://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification 1440 https://lxnaydesign.net/funtoo-hobby-mode/ https://lxnaydesign.net/funtoo-hobby-mode/ Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Daniel Robbins ended Funtoo Linux on 26 July 2024, revived it nineteen days later as a personal project he called "hobby mode" — a term borrowed from TenFourFox — and then ended it a second time, in a page edit stamped 05 Sep 2025 that no news site covered. The tree had already stopped: nothing has been pushed to any of the 72 repositories in the funtoo GitHub organisation, which is where ego sync pulls from by default, since 29 January 2025, so the command still succeeds and brings you nothing. What that means on disk (openssl-1.1.1q is the only OpenSSL ebuild at the commit meta-repo still pins — not merely end-of-life but five public releases short of the end, missing eleven CVE fixes the OpenSSL project shipped in 1.1.1t through 1.1.1w, one of them rated High and dated eighteen months before hobby mode was announced), why build.funtoo.org answers every stage-3 request with an empty-bucket error, what came back in June 2026 as Kernel Seeds and standalone funtoo-ng components, and five checks that tell the three kinds of distribution ending — rename, hobby mode, silence — apart from the outside. Nothing was run on a Funtoo machine to produce it. https://lxnaydesign.net/boot-a-2006-live-dvd/ https://lxnaydesign.net/boot-a-2006-live-dvd/ Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Four things stop a twenty-year-old live image starting on a machine bought this decade: firmware that no longer speaks BIOS, a kernel with no NVMe driver until Linux 3.3 and no xHCI until 2.6.31, and an X server that has never heard of the graphics card. Each named and solved, with a QEMU invocation justified flag by flag from the option reference — the i440FX/PIIX3 machine behind SeaBIOS, IDE rather than virtio, a period CPU model, and the audio spelling that replaced the -soundhw removed in QEMU 7.1 — plus a symptom-to-flag failure table built from Gentoo's own documented boot options, the Ventoy memdisk route and its sub-1 GB limit, why these ISOs pre-date isohybrid and cannot be dd'd to a stick, and an appendix on archiving an old image so it survives. Also the honest answer about the spinning cube: Xgl needed accelerated GLX, virgl's guest driver arrived in 2015, and the thing that sold the distribution is the one thing an emulator cannot give back. No image was booted to produce this piece. https://lxnaydesign.net/mocaccinoos/ https://lxnaydesign.net/mocaccinoos/ Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Everyone repeats that Sabayon rebranded to MocaccinoOS and nobody says what the sentence means, so this scores the claim on four axes: people, code, repository and philosophy. It also settles the base question from the build definitions rather than the announcements — MocaccinoOS Desktop is seeded from a Gentoo stage3 autobuild pulled from distfiles.gentoo.org and layered with a pinned gentoo/gentoo tree snapshot, and the Funtoo move announced in November 2020 was abandoned by the project itself on 6 December 2021. Plus the four Sabayon-named packages still published in the 2026 repository index, the documented Sabayon migration path and why its first step cannot work, the 32-release ladder from October 2021 to 26.08, and the sustainability note in which the project reports its funding as roughly one dollar a month. Nothing described here was installed to write it. https://lxnaydesign.net/matrixos/ https://lxnaydesign.net/matrixos/ Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Sabayon's founder is shipping a Gentoo-based immutable distribution, and the disclaimer calling it a hobby project not intended for production has been in the repository since the first commit at 18:04 on 31 January 2026. What it publishes — four variants, eight OSTree refs all marked dev, images signed by one build node — and what its release process does between its two commits: it deletes the ebuild tree, the headers and the static libraries, which is the concrete answer to whether immutable and source-based can coexist. Plus the three tiers of escape (transient unlock, the -full ref, a one-way jailbreak), the two-month rollback window, and what would have to change for any of it to stop being a hobby. Assembled from the repository, its git history and its published artifacts; nothing was installed to write it. https://lxnaydesign.net/gentoo-binaries-entropy/ https://lxnaydesign.net/gentoo-binaries-entropy/ Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Gentoo counted 89 GB of amd64 binary packages on its own mirrors in January 2026; the x86-64 index alone, downloaded and parsed on 4 August 2026, listed 19,715 builds of 7,377 packages, with 3,178 package versions present as more than one build and 1,514 of those in genuinely different USE configurations. What Entropy actually was, what the 2008 objection got right, what Portage 3.0.78 changed on 3 May 2026 when it made binary-package signature verification the default, and a full equo-to-Portage translation table taken from the Entropy source rather than from memory. No system described here was run to produce this piece. https://lxnaydesign.net/distro-died-what-to-do/ https://lxnaydesign.net/distro-died-what-to-do/ Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 A checklist for a machine whose distribution no longer exists: what to freeze on day one, and why the installed system is now the only surviving record of itself; what actually got more dangerous, from an end-of-life kernel branch to OpenSSL 1.1.1 after September 2023 and the local privilege-escalation floor underneath the browser; how to find the nearest living base; and the Sabayon-to-Gentoo conversion worked in seven stages, each with a checkpoint and a rollback — ending in the verdict that most machines should be reinstalled instead. Assembled from Gentoo and Sabayon documentation and archived threads; no machine was migrated to produce it. https://lxnaydesign.net/sabayon-what-happened/ https://lxnaydesign.net/sabayon-what-happened/ Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 The shutdown timeline with a checkable date on every step: the last blog post in January 2018, the last stable release built on 27 March 2019, the last daily image on 8 July 2020, the mirror sync that stopped at 01:00:02 UTC the next morning, the three changes bundled into one announcement on 20 November 2020, and what every Sabayon-era host answers with in August 2026 — including the domain that now redirects to its founder’s newest project. https://lxnaydesign.net/rr4-rr64-sabayon/ https://lxnaydesign.net/rr4-rr64-sabayon/ Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Every release of the Gentoo-based live DVD that became Sabayon Linux, in order, from the Gentoo Forums thread of August 2004 to the 3.0RC2 rename in August 2006 — plus how anyone moved a DVD image across a 2006 connection (torrents, donated FTP mirrors, per-release MD5 files and xdelta binary patches), what the miniEdition actually cut according to its own 997-package manifest, and where the surviving 19.03 images live in 2026 with checksums verified against two independent mirrors. https://lxnaydesign.net/sabayon-alternatives-2026/ https://lxnaydesign.net/sabayon-alternatives-2026/ Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Sabayon stopped at 19.03 in March 2019. Five living systems each do part of what it did — Redcore Linux Hardened 2601, Calculate Linux, MocaccinoOS 26.08, matrixOS and plain Gentoo with the official binhost — compared on documented properties, with who each one is actually for. Assembled from release notes and project documentation; nothing was installed to write it. https://lxnaydesign.net/the-board/ https://lxnaydesign.net/the-board/ Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 The phpBB board that was RR4/RR64 Linux’s entire support organisation went from 709 posts in November 2005 to 4,117 in July 2006, and 30 people online at once was its record. What its ten forums say about how a one-man project delegated, what the release report of 18 June 2006 actually contained (59 feature lines, 25 fixes, and a satisfaction poll with two votes), why its ~20% speed claim is unfalsifiable, what a count of the 481 thread titles that survive says actually broke and the current procedure for each cluster — and where the Sabayon forums, wiki and code are in August 2026, host by host.