I am proud to announce that TinyMe 2009 “Acorn” Alpha 2 has been released! Even though it's called Alpha 2, this is our first Unity-based release and as such will benefit from heavy testing.
This is a rather rough release. Really, the only thing I'm concerned about is hardware compatibility. This does not have a lot of the spit 'n shine you would normally see as a result. You should note these things:
As Unity does not currently have a 2.6.30 legacy kernel, this release is for Pentium 2 or better computers. Some old AMD K6-based processors may not work. I will have a legacy build of the kernel ready as soon as it's ready upstream at Unity.
Logging out is done by right-clicking on the desktop.
Shutting down and rebooting are done from the login screen.
You can expect these improvements in the next release:
Shutting down, rebooting, and logging out available from the main menu.
SLiM as login manager instead of GDM.
We may have a different menu layout. I brought up a discussion where I said I didn't much care for our current menu layout and that I liked the menu layout from PCLinuxOS 0.92 better. As it just so happens, I still have the PCLinuxOS 0.92 LiveCD, and so we should be able to poke around in it.
Discussion
240 MB? I thought this was tinyme?
Really though, how can I help? I'm pretty much a linux newb. I have installed puppy, tinyme, ubuntu & pclinuxos, mint, and open solaris. I also have virtualbox running on my macbook pro that is running OSX 10.4.
I like the idea of a small OS running on old hardware.
If there is something that I can do just let me know.
There are quite a few things currently in TinyMe which are going to go in the future. #1 is Python. Python is stinking huge, and I hate it for that. Once Python is gone, the ISO size should be well under 200MB, and I can start thinking about adding applications to it.
I can't say how quickly we'll be able to get rid of Python. Smart, the package manager, is built on Python. We have a version of Smart called Smart-Lite which doesn't need Python to be installed. However, the main Control Center has a requirement on newt, and newt has a requirement on Python. I don't know how soon we'll be able to take care of that.
hello I would like to express my appreciation and thanks to great work by you tinyme.is my first linux distro and I'm very happy with it.
I hope to continue faithful to the philosophy of an operating system for light and relatively old hardware.
Thank you for a wonderful distro. It is one of the best. (I tried the PCLinuxOS LXDE version, but I was disappointed to find out it was a bloated piece of garbage.) Stick with KISS get the better of the inner schweinehund telling you to bloat the distro down.
Really? I rather liked PCLOS LXDE, although yes, I thought they tried to do too much with it. MPlayer was rather unnecessary.
Thanks to everybody for their praises.
Hi, just try your distro for my laptop…
I came across this distro by a mention on some web blow.
I´m looking for something with a recent kernel, compiled in i386 mode, not i686, as I plan to run it on an embedded system with a 400Mhz Transmeta Crusoe CPU, and just 256MB of RAM.
Now, one suggestion: the main web page should this project should clearly indicate which kernel version it includes, in what architecture is it compiled for (i386, i686, etc), and what basic applications are included… (VNC? Firefox?)
Best FC