Been thinking of making my own distro

[Sunny Rabbiera]

As the future gets more uncertain for my personal life, I am thinking of making my more public life more active to make up for my own personal drought.
Lately I have been thinking of just giving it in and start making my own linux distro.
I dont think Ubuntu really has any direction right now it seems, I have been getting more distant from Ubuntu and branching out a bit.
As of right now I am considering doing this:
Take a simple base of Ubuntu/Debian packages (as I am most familiar with a debian system), put them together and start working on my own distro.
I am considering doing this:
Making it ubuntu based to start off with, then branch off into a more debian like release scheduel.
I am probably going to base it on Hardy as I feel intrepid too unsturdy.
It will be KDE 3 based, since Kubuntu is not going to be LTS with its 8.04 release and will end official support in October, this new distro will pick up the slack where it will leave off.
It will ship with Synaptic instead of adept, it will also ship with firefox and Thunderbird.
In a way it will be more like Simplymepis as opposed to Kubuntu, at least in terms of packaging, I will debate on rather if I should just ship flash and codecs by default.
I live in the US but to be honest, I dont give a crap.
If Adobe, Microsoft and every other greedy company wants to sue me let them go ahead.
I am mainly considering this distro because of Kubuntu's decisions to cut support for A hardy release in october, because they were silly enough to hop into the KDE 4 bandwagon.
I just dont know anymore, I like Ubuntu, I like its community but the distro itself seems to be cloudy in its future.

[muzicman0]

Re: Been thinking of making my own distro

have fun. personally, I love KDE4.2, and wouldn't want to take a step backwards.

mm0

[Sunny Rabbiera]

Re: Been thinking of making my own distro

have fun. personally, I love KDE4.2, and wouldn't want to take a step backwards.

mm0

For me KDE 4.2 still seems like a step backwards, at least in terms of functionality.
KDE 4.2 lacks a lot, there is the annoying audio CD bug where for some stupid reason KDE 4.2 doesnt want to read a audio CD and neither do its apps.
You cant add any applications to the media manager, what Totem or Xine to handle DVD's as opposed to the crappy dragonplayer?
Tough
Heck even gnome can do this now.
Plasma still feels unstable
And the lack of themes right now leaves a lot to be desired in KDE 4.2
Its nice in effects, but if you just use it because of eye candy you might as well use Vista.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Been thinking of making my own distro

....

For me KDE 4.2 still seems like a step backwards, at least in terms of functionality.
KDE 4.2 lacks a lot, there is the annoying audio CD bug where for some stupid reason KDE 4.2 doesnt want to read a audio CD and neither do its apps.
You cant add any applications to the media manager, what Totem or Xine to handle DVD's as opposed to the crappy dragonplayer?
Tough
Heck even gnome can do this now.
Plasma still feels unstable
And the lack of themes right now leaves a lot to be desired in KDE 4.2
Its nice in effects, but if you just use it because of eye candy you might as well use Vista.

Sunny, I admire your spunk, but you seem to be a little shy on legal experience nor do you seem to fully understand the difficulties of beginning and supporting your own distro AND the 800 to 1500 programs you will need to make your distro functional for the average user.

American corporations have paid both Republican AND Democrat politicians millions of dollars in bribes (a.k.a "campaign donations") to pass legislation making violation of their property rights not just a civil offense but in many cases a criminal offense as well! Your WRITTEN and published statement that you "don't care if they sue you" would be prima fascia evidence in a court of law that you willfully and with intent either/or violated their IP and/or broke the law. If you are convicted of IP violations they could assess treble damages plus penalties which could cause your future earnings to be garnished or confiscated for the remainder of your life, or you could spend several years in prison PLUS fines, and be prohibited from touching a computer for the rest of your life. Such is life living in a corporate-government cabal. That is why all distros made by people under the jurisdiction of US law do not contain non-free or patented software.

KDE 4.2.1 is very stable for me, and VERY functional. A few days ago I momentarily dropped back to KDE 3.5.10 on Mandriva 2009 PWP to recover from Mandriva's faulty KDE 4.2 rpms, and I was astounded by how crippled Konqi was, and how it tied my hands, compared to Dolphin. And, I have zero problems burning audio CDs nor do I have any problems playing them. You mention a "bug", but have you posted that bug to the KDE bugzilla?

Adding other applications to the media manager? Let's see... I have and use VLC, Dragon Player, Avidemux (you can open a video DVD with it and it will take all the VOB files and combine them into one wav file), Audacity, Kdenlive, kino, kmplayer, mplayer, kstreamripper and Realplayer 11. I have used every one of them and everyone of them work well.

By the way, I don't play with effects and I don't have desktop effects enabled. I did turn it on for a while to see the spinning cube, the burning apps, etc., but those glitzy things just take up CPU cycles. When I close an app I don't like to wait while it does flips in the end zone and spikes the ball.

And, yes, I have things crash occasionally (Kubuntu 9.04 IS an ALPHA release, after all) but I've never had the desktop hang or go down or blow me into a terminal login prompt. All the crashes so far appear to be what I call "live zombies". I close FireFox3 and it appears to go away. Later, while I am doing something else, a msg pops up saying that FireFox has crashed, which indicates that an FF thread didn't go away because someone forgot a "delete someobject" line somewhere in their close procedure.

"Might as well use VISTA" is a strange recommendation. VISTA, and Windows in general, is known for its VULNERABILITIES, its DRM restrictions, and VISTA did something twice on this laptop that NO Linux distro has done -- throw a BSOD or a "VISTA has lost the display connection... trying to reconnect...". Aside from that VISTA on this laptop WAS stable and not too unreasonably slow. I say WAS because last weekend I felt that Kubuntu 9.04 was good enough that I could give my entire HD over to it. I have NOT been disappointed.

To be really frank, the problems you mention are so trivial, and self constructed, that they suggest you don't have the ability to build your own distro and support it.

[Sunny Rabbiera]

Re: Been thinking of making my own distro

Feh like I said I stopped caring ages ago about Adobe and companies like that, let them sue me.
Its time someone stood up for open source, if I wind up victim of them so be it...
I am not intimidated, nor will I be intimidated.
I am just not satisfied with a lot of distros right now, I got enough linux experience to know what to do to make a distro.
Its time that is the only thing running against me.

[kubicle]

Re: Been thinking of making my own distro

Debian is a pretty good distribution if you want KDE3. 5.0 was released in February, so it's fairly up-to-date, supported for a long time and still has KDE3.

If you really wish to take on the task of creating your own distribution, then Debian should be a good base (rather than aging hardy)...I guess you could add some extra value by including non-free stuff, but you'd still have to compete with debian itself (and that's tough competition).

Of course, even debian Lenny (and your distribution as well) will become dated eventually, since there are no KDE3 updates expected anymore.

Also, by the time KDE3 support ends in major distributions, KDE4 will have an extra release or two under it's belt, and the user base for KDE3 should be greatly diminished (although I won't say non-existent)

[Qqmike]

Re: Been thinking of making my own distro

@Sunny Rabbiera: along with Debian,you might check out sidux. The non-free stuff doesn't come in the package (I don't think), but it's right there.

[kevinc]

Re: Been thinking of making my own distro

Why not?! Linux allows you to do this. Debian is a good base, it's used by many distros, it tends towards the 'rock solid' side, so stability and reliability are built in. I agree with FF and TB, also with all the 'restricted' add-ons. Who wants a linux box that you can't use to watch a DVD, or surf because it doesn't have the plugins or whatever, because of copyrights?

Here's an interesting article by Toad on Ubuntu Customization Kit -
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...opic=3099957.0

There is a good article too on building your own distro, I think under the Linux Documentation Project

Also, Debian 5.0.0 (Lenny) now includes live CD's. (not the same as the usual install CD / DVD.

[kubicle]

Re: Been thinking of making my own distro

along with Debian,you might check out sidux.

Sidux (although a very nice distribution) might not be the best choice if you want KDE3, as Sidux is based on Debian Sid (unstable). It likely switches to KDE4.

from: http://sidux.com/Article485.html

sidux after the "freeze"
Now that "Lenny" is about to be released, the version freeze that reached up to sid will be lifted again within the next few days. Given that there are a number of high impact changes (KDE4, X.org 7.4/ evdev) staging in experimental and just waiting for the freeze to be lifted, the following 2-3 weeks might be slightly more vibrant and potentially less coordinated than usual in regards to package updates from Debian, therefore we recommend a little caution during dist-upgrades. This might involve checking for eventual upgrade warnings on sidux.com or to wait a few hours if KDE4 or X.org are among the upgrading packages for experiences from advanced users. Please be aware that it is harder to react in time, now that Debian employs four mirror pushes a day.
Users who are already using unsupported KDE4 packages from Debian/ experimental or other sources, might be surprised that the final KDE4 packages heading to sid will most likely use ~/.kde/ for their configuration data again, instead of ~/.kde4/. Manual changes are likely to be required in these cases.

[Qqmike]

Re: Been thinking of making my own distro

@ kubicle -- yes, exactly, thanks for the catch. Should happen fairly soon if all goes well. I let that point slip then re Sunny Rabbiera's criteria

[GreyGeek]

Re: Been thinking of making my own distro

....
Users who are already using unsupported KDE4 packages from Debian/ experimental or other sources, might be surprised that the final KDE4 packages heading to sid will most likely use ~/.kde/ for their configuration data again, instead of ~/.kde4/. Manual changes are likely to be required in these cases.

"heading to sid".... that puts the kibosh on all that gossip in some forums that claimed Canonical/Ubuntu/Kubuntu didn't contribute patches back up stream.

[kubicle]

Re: Been thinking of making my own distro

"heading to sid".... that puts the kibosh on all that gossip in some forums that claimed Canonical/Ubuntu/Kubuntu didn't contribute patches back up stream.

Errr....that was a sidux news article I was quoting, and it's about KDE4 moving from Debian experimental into unstable (they can probably do that without Canonical )