Technical Report September 2005

Tech Report Aug/Sep 2005

Distro play and test day came and went. We had positive feedback re the distro with a few suggestions from a few people, ie. menu names, CD-installer messages...

The distro we're currently giving to recipients is rock solid with no bugs outstanding as far as I know. Many thanks to John and Kylie and all the tech vols for keeping on top of this. We're really happy with it.

One issue though that may prevent us from further developing the current distro is the debian package management of 'unstable' software. There seem to be issues when upgrading K* packages. So while we're happy with the current state, we've been looking at other options re future releases.

KUbuntu (kubuntu.org) is an Ubuntu distro with KDE packages loaded rather than GNOME. Many of us are impressed with it, and John and myself have been customising it in order to get the same look and feel as the current distro. Still a work in progress.

The Canonical Ltd group (the org that distributes *Ubuntu software) provide a release every six months. They have their own debian repositories which they manage themselves... this allows for safe upgrading of packages... very appealing considering the current state of package management.

So a KUbuntu-style distro is looking like a possibility.

Con Validas