Hello there!

First of all let me wish you all a happy year 2013 to you and your
families, happiness, health, wealth :p, etc.

The purpose of this email is that this year, I'd like to publish the
successor of Gondwana ;). It's been a long time we've been talking about
it and the major remaining issues are the installer and the persistence
tool. Of course that's not all but the other issues are far less
critical for this new version to be massively adopted, in my opinion. So
I'd like us to publish the 2.0 as soon as possible. We'll publish
updates with enhancements and new features later, for the 2.1 and so.

The 2.0 is an important step forward since its interface has been
greatly improved and the set of application has been extended. It also
provides newer hardware drivers as well as custom scripts to enhance the
so-called user experience. Finally, publishing the 2.0 will let us work
on next development release, based on Debian Wheezy instead of Squeeze.
Wheezy provides optimized ARM binaries, armhf and Raspberry PI as a
replacement of armel, this is then an expected change from all ARM
fanatics!

As you know this is difficult to talk about a planning because we don't
have a dedicated workforce. However, I'd like to show a pre-2.0 release,
say 1.99, for the French event InterTICE on 5/6/7th February. As a
result I've started to work on two points:

* internationalization of boot and shutdown process (this was a
regression compared to Gondwana)

* the installer!

If you want to look at the persistence tool in the meanwhile, please do!

Concerning the installer, Gérald proposed months ago to divert the Linux
Mint installer. So I downloaded its latest version, patched the code
(fortunately this is Python code, thus easy to change) and the good news
is that I've just managed to make it install the development version of
DDL onto an old computer from the live CD :). Admittedly I had to do
manual tweaks afterwards because the bootloader installation failed, but
it's on the good way! I'll open a dedicated thread about this installer
because there is a lot to say and to change to make it fit our
distribution.

Another important thing about the 2.0: internationalization. Since we
now have more than 30 languages registered on Transifex, I *cannot*
alone tweak all the languages CD's, it's too much work and I already
have a lot of other things to do. So I need help and it'd be a good
initiative if every language manager take the necessary time to download
the development version, change each application setting that need to be
changed, and then send me the resulting configuration files.

Finally, there are other aspects to look at for this new version, like
artwork and website. A dedicated thread is needed for these two topics,
in the graphics mailing list. I'd like the 2.0 to have another graphic
design to obviously show that this is not “yet another” remix of
Gondwana. Drawers are then wanted (where are they by the way???).
Concerning the website, I'd like to change it totally for the 2.0. I'd
like to change its layout as it was proposed months ago and to better
highlight in the home page why we should all use DDL instead of X or Y.
I'd also like to prepare the website for a future online store that I
hope to happen not so far in the future ;).

That said, let's go back to work!

-- 
Cheers,
JM.

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part

_______________________________________________
Doudoulinux-dev mailing list
[email protected]
https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/doudoulinux-dev

Reply via email to