Another try at an alpha for 2008.1

The majority of my time is spent packaging applications for PCLinuxOS. Not working on TinyMe? No, not working on TinyMe. I'm usually found sitting in front of either Medit or Kate, working on one package or another.

Okay, okay, most of the applications I work on are found in TinyMe. But very few of them go to the TinyMe repos– most go to the PCLinuxOS repos. If you want, you can see what programs I package here:

http://www.mypclinuxos.com/doku.php/santalittlehelper:contribrecord:kdulcimer

Lately I've been trying to figure out what changed in AbiWord 2.6.4 that means it won't build whereas 2.6.3 built just fine. I also recently sent a package for Asio to Tex so hopefully we can rebuild the AbiWord AbiCollab plugin with better functionality. And I have several packages waiting in the queue to be built for the first time.

I haven't touched TinyMe much since 2008.0 was released. Plus, I changed to a SATA hard drive and had a very difficult time getting PCLinuxOS to work on it. TinyMe proved impossible– so I just moved development to a virtual machine.

I installed TinyMe 2008.0 inside VMWare and immediately fired up Synaptic, connected it to the repos, and installed updates. I was curious to see how many megabytes it would take to update TinyMe. I saw it was just over 100MB. On one hand, I was somewhat amazed. Here it was about 10 weeks after 2008.0 was released, and already the updates were half the size of the ISO. On the other hand, I was glad to see that the updates were only up to half the size of the ISO. If the updates were equal to or greater than the ISO size, then I would have to seriously consider creating a updated release of TinyMe 2008.0.

Once I got that out of the way, I set to transforming TinyMe 2008.0 into a lighter TinyMe 2008.1.

I enabled the testing repos and installed the legacy kernel 2.6.24.4. I was sad to see that the new kernel will consume 5 extra megabytes of precious space. However, I hope that this new kernel will see more functionality, more speed, and and more users coming to TinyMe.

What's on the desktop will be greatly simplified. When you start TinyMe 2008.0, these programs are working on the desktop:

• Nitrogen (Sets wallpaper)
• iDesk (Displays desktop icons)
• LXPanel (Panel at bottom of screen)
• Conky (System monitor, upper right corner)

However, as of this point TinyMe 2008.1 will have just PCManFM (wallpaper, icons) and LXPanel. Conky will dropped for this release but will most likely return for 2009.0. I also tweaked the order in which things start up and am happy to report this new setup starts up much faster.

Last time I blogged, I discussed the possiblity of SLiM and Qingy as login managers. However, there was one other login manager which had slipped my mind: XDM. I'm currently taking a look into setting it up for TinyMe. I have it in place and running. It starts up openbox-session just fine. Logging out works well too.

However, there are a couple of things concerning XDM I would like to have implemented, not necessarily for the first alpha, but for 2008.1 Final.

First and foremost is the ability to have multiple people logged in. I'm currently Googling to see if XDM also allows this behavior, and if so, how I could implement it.

Second, I would like to be able to switch from one user session to another. GDM currently allows this quite nicely through the command “gdmflexiserver”.

Okay, so I'm going to take a leap and talk about some ideas I have concerning the future of TinyMe. As of this point, I'm thinking the xxxx.0 releases will be “full” releases with AbiWord, a text editor, Sylpheed for e-mail, a browser (something WebKit-based, very likely: Midori, Kazehakase, and Skipstone are all top candidates), and more stuff like that. The xxxx.1 releases will be as barebones as I can get them. They will have a graphical desktop environment. I won't promise Synaptic or PCC, although 2008.1 will most likely have both.