Ok, the question is simple.

Is there already any alpha or demo of shift under Linux going on right now?
I want to begin working with it, so i'd like to know where to begin.

Since they just announced it, it's very unlikely, just try working with Arch alone right now.

Where would we get up-to-date news?

you should be able to track the news and other information here

http://www.shiftlinux.net/

I can't find the IRC channel..

The channel is #shiftlinux on irc.neowin.net

you can find out about the IRC server here http://services.neowin.net/irc/ and the shift channel is #shiftlinux

Tech preview coming just as soon as the mouse works!

Thats awesome,cant wait to give it a try!!

Still working on the ******* mouse. The new Xorg changed the way mice are handled - nice. Here.

I am personally very interested in this Shift Arch distro. I know Arch is faster and leaner than Ubuntu. I'm looking forward to trying it out! I have a five year old laptop and Ubuntu is speedy on it but I want more! lol

I can relate and wait for the beta not sure how many new users to arch would like to # Xorg -configure then install the other necessary drivers on a much anticipated distro.

OK, these news are a bit old but, we have X running in a dirt way that we don't really like, but it's a start. I'm currently in Final Exams mode, but I have break starting Saturday. So, basically, expect a development proof of concept alpha sometime near January 1st (if all goes well).

I'm done with exams now and can go back to managing the distro how I wanted to. The shift (pun intended) of power was at an inconvenient time, I only had a week before I needed to dedicate more time to studying.

So if you're wondering why we had a few days of activity then silence... there it is.

I'm done with exams too! Convenient we both ended on the same day huh simon360?

Before I make an ISO for testing, i need a bootscreen and a wallpaper. See GRUB guidelines for the bootscreen. I NEED those as we can't legally have "Arch Linux" anywhere basically, they've got their name and logo copyrighted.

I don't believe this would be an issue if only developers had acess to this release... I don't believe early bases for the system would be of any use to users, even if they just wanted to take a look because they would be basically watching ArchLinux, not yet Shift for that purpose...

Please hurry uploading that ISO so we can everybody get to work on it

About that ISO - We've added some basic *new* wifi drivers to this release and are going to split with Arch on this one - we're not using Arch's network modules, instead, we're bringing over Gnome's NetworkManager for managing the wifi. That might sound like a bunch of garbage, but, get this, I was able to set up wifi on my laptop - a first! No downloads needed, no installation (but there MIGHT be one configuration file to change, changing the name of the interface "wlan0" might register as something else on other computers - I don't know.)

In short - Better Wifi.

Edit: Arch Linux's network daemon, not modules.