Starting a New Linux Distro


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Hey everyone, some friends and I (Neowin members) are in the planning stages of a new Linux distro (yes, another one :p ). We're aiming at netbooks specifically (laptops as a 2nd priority) after seeing the market for netbooks and the lack of a market leader, per say. The distribution is called Firefly Linux, and we've got a very preliminary website at http://fireflylinux.com. The distro itself will be based on Arch Linux (but won't be dependant on it). We haven't chosen a desktop environment yet, and are open to anything fit for a netbook.

However, we do need some help - our team now consists of about 5 people, but we'd love to expand the team and get the project rolling. If you're interested in the project or wanting to take a stab at helping us pick applications, build them, make the website, themes, or just want to sit and chat, join #fireflylinux on irc.freenode.net.

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Hey this is a cool idea! I had an Asus eeePC but gave it to my cousins. It was cool but they had a major PC failure and it plugged up nicely to their monitor. But this is a growth area.

What I personally didn't like about the Asus was the distro that came with it. I installed a modified Xubuntu and that was okay. Then I went to Ubuntu and that was cool, but a bit tight given the hardware.

Liberate us all with Firefly!! I'll buy another Asus!!!!!

Having said all that, the Asus Linux version is nice with its tabbed idiot-proof windows. For your noob user, it is the best there is for simplicity's sake. I just didn't like it's XP silver look and, well, I preferred Ubuntu's Gnome. There is so much work to be done there, getting a sleek, smart look for Linux. I'd not throw away the ideas there in the original Asus Linux version. I'd just improve upon them. :D

Edited by James7
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I made my own distro for my eeePC and an Acer One.

-I used xfbdev/xvesa instead of Xorg (who care about 3D on a netbook, surelly not me).

-I hacked inittab to start x at init2 with a little C program to force login at this stage

-Deleted all services exept nessessary one and added usefull one (networking, acpid, hdparm, networkmanager) after the last rc-level. While the user wait for the web browser to load, they will open.

-I used Arora as browser instead of Firefox. Arora (with qt 4.5-alpha) can use browser plugins and use direct rendering instead of slow repainting like gtk apps /firefox. Framerate is 20-30x better.

-I used many Qt4 apps for the same reason, they have better frame rate and use repaint (slow on xfbdev and not really fast on xvesa)

-I used AwesomeWm as windows manager, with fluxbox and JWM as options

-I configured the sessions/user/windows manager/resolution/language/keyboard from grub using few hack (and the kernel command line) and wrote a bash login manager to get the args and do the right things.

-----It use no ram at all (gdm/kdm are heavy)

-----No (0.0* second) loading time

------Do the job fine and save the previous settings as default in menu.lst

------*grub support submenu by the way, I know that nobody know that exept me, but it is usefull in this case.

-I did add a nice splash screen and a console frame buffer background (dirty, unsupported, obselete, old kernel patches...)

My distro don't work perfectly and I have no time to work on it. But in theory, it is possible to cut boot speed to 7-15 seconds. It is actually something like 25 to the desktop, not bad, but I still have many timeout and errors.

I think that boot speed is the most important thing to ajust on a netbook and those hack do exactly that, and work. If you are interested to take that way, I may help, if you are not, I don't see the point of making another distribution.

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Thanks Elv13, yes, boot time is a huge one. I've looked at the Splashtop project for some ideas and we'll look into it - of course, boot time is dependent on the netbook in question. I've also used Arora previously and the WebKit part of it is nice.

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By takign a look at bootchart, you will see that most of the bootime is just a long "wait();", it does not depend on the netbook that much. It is a matter of optimisation. Look at how much time Xandros on the eeePC take too boot (forget bios and boot loader), it is really fast, same for splashtop, but it is possible to do better. But for that, you have to build a kernel for each targetted netbooks.

If you want some of my work or more info, just send me a mail elv1313 ($/-\T) gmail.

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