About Still Seeding

Still Seeding is an independent publication about how Linux distributions start, how they end, and what is left running afterwards. It is written and edited by one person, Zane Hitchcox, and it is published at an address with a history that is not his.

Who publishes this

Me. Zane Hitchcox — an independent publisher, not a company, not a foundation and not a team. I write the pieces, maintain the Register, answer the mail at editor@lxnaydesign.net, and own every error on the site. There is no contact form and no press office, because there is nobody else here.

I am not a Sabayon developer, was not part of the project, and have no relationship with anyone who was.

Why this site is at this address

2005·10·27The earliest capture of this domain in the Internet Archive is from October 2005. For the next ten months it was lxnay dEsigN, the personal site of the Italian developer Fabio Erculiani, and the home of a Gentoo-based installable live DVD called RR4 Linux and its 64-bit sibling RR64.

2006·08·16In August 2006 that project was renamed Sabayon Linux and moved to its own domain. This one was left behind. It expired, was re-registered by other people, and passed through a design blog, a parking page, a thin content farm, an open directory listing, a Chinese-language gambling doorway and finally a casino-affiliate site. That is the state it was in when it expired again and became available.

I registered it in 2026. Not to continue the original project — it is gone, its author moved on twice, and pretending otherwise would be a lie a reader could check in one click. I registered it because the addresses that still point here were written by people who wanted to know about a Gentoo-based live distro, and because that subject deserves a publication rather than a parked page or another casino.

The honest version of what happened to this domain is: a real thing lived here, it left, several unrelated things squatted in the space, and now something new is published from the same address. The history gets a home. It does not get impersonated.

This domain was lxnay dEsigN, the home of RR4/RR64 Linux — later Sabayon — from 2005 to 2006. It changed hands several times afterwards and was re-registered in 2026 by the people who publish Still Seeding. We are not Fabio Erculiani and are not affiliated with the Sabayon project, MocaccinoOS, matrixOS or the Gentoo Foundation.

What this site will not do

• Brand itself as lxnay, RR4, RR64 or Sabayon. No reuse of the old wordmark, logo, template or colours, and no recreation of a Sabayon, RR4 or Gentoo mark. The domain is the address, not the identity.
• Republish anything from the Internet Archive. The archive established what was here and which URLs earned links. Every sentence on this site is written for it. Titles, dates, URLs, checksums and forum counters are recorded as facts, visually marked as citation, and never presented as our own writing.
• Host, mirror or re-serve an ISO. Not one byte. Where surviving images live is a matter of record and gets written down; serving them is somebody else’s job and somebody else’s bandwidth.
• Claim to have run things it has not run. See below.

How the pieces are researched

Histories are written from records, and the records for this subject are unusually good: release announcements, changelogs, package manifests, checksum files, mailing lists, commit logs, bug trackers, forum threads and archived captures of sites that no longer exist. Every factual sentence on this site can name where it came from, and every article ends with a Sources & method block listing them with the date each was accessed.

Three rules follow from that, and they are not negotiable:

• No first-person product experience, ever. I do not write “I installed this”, “I tested this” or “I ran it for a month”, because on this site it would not be true. Where a piece describes how to do something — migrating a dead distro to its upstream, booting a 2006 image under QEMU — it says in the body that the procedure is assembled from documentation and archived reports rather than from a machine I own. That is a legal line under 16 CFR 465.2(a), and it is also the only version a reader can trust.
• Dates over adjectives. “Quiet after 2018, last release 19.03 in March 2019” tells you something. “Development slowed considerably” does not. Anything that can change carries the date it was last checked.
• Say what could not be established. Every piece closes with a Standing block that separates what is still true from what has ended, what is now actively wrong, and what I could not settle from primary sources. A piece with nothing in the last category is usually a piece that was not researched hard enough.

Opinion is welcome here, about ideas and engineering decisions. Shipping proprietary graphics drivers on a free-software DVD in 2006 was a real argument with two real sides, and this site will take one. What opinion never gets to be is an invented experience.

Who this is for

Someone who followed a twenty-year-old forum link and wants to know what happened. Someone with a machine running a distribution that no longer exists. Someone who wants the version with dates in it rather than the version with feelings in it. And, occasionally, someone who was there and can tell me what I got wrong — that mail is the most useful mail this site gets.

Money

There are no advertisements, no affiliate links, no sponsored posts and no paid links on this site. The full policy, including exactly what would have to be disclosed and where if that ever changed, is on Disclosures. How the site is built and what it costs is on the Colophon.

Contact and corrections

editor@lxnaydesign.net — one address, read by one person. If something here is wrong, Corrections explains what happens next, and it happens in public. Contact covers what is worth writing about and what the answer will be if you are asking for a link.