Roadblocks

Sometimes in development it feels like you're doing nothing but hitting one roadblock after another. That's what working with TinyMe has felt like for the past few weeks.

The most recent frustration is with the GTK themes. I can only get the Murrine based themes to function, and I can't figure out why– all the proper GTK packages are installed. What's more, I don't have this problem on my main machine. I very stubbornly refuse to release even an alpha if GTK themes don't work.

Ultimately, it's issues like this which leave me throwing my hands up in the air and starting over from scratch.

MDawkins and I have also been working on building an ISO via RPMS. It's actually quite simple if you already have Unity running on your machine. In theory, you just run this command:

smart -o rpm-root=/mnt/data/tinyme/iso_from_rpms/ install basesystem

and you have effectively created the base for a TinyMe system. Now, if I were actually wanting to create a TinyMe system out of this, I would have to install a few more packages:

smart -o rpm-root=/mnt/data/tinyme/iso_from_rpms/ install smart tilda lxpanel osmo asunder task-x11 recorder alsaplayer nitrogen netsurf kernel-legacy-2.6.30.5-unity0.1.lgc grub alsa-utils aumix mklivecd slim locales-en bootsplash smart-channels-unity unity-gfxboot-theme lxappearance abiword

After this, -again, in theory- you can:

1. Use the chroot command to switch to /mnt/data/tinyme/iso_from_rpms/ and run mklivecd from there, or
2. Run mklivecd with the –root=/mnt/data/tinyme/iso_from_rpms/ option.

At this point in time, the resulting ISO will not actually boot.

However, I can see which packages are installed, then compare that list with what I have in my current TinyMe development environment. However, that list is fairly substantial and wading through it can take some time.