As I have briefly talked about on Episode 87, I have spend the last month or so remastering Xubuntu according to my personal tastes. I build the final .iso image yesterday and installed the first version of Katian on my main machine this morning. It still has a few bugs, but it’s mostly working and so I have released it earlier today as Katian Crow 0.00 — in case you are wondering, the distro itself got its name the same way that Debian did and the first release series is named after Crow, Adelai Niska’s henchman from the Firefly episode “The Train Job“. As suggested by this naming choice, we are talking about extremely unstable alpha software here. You are welcome to try it, but don’t blame me if your system looks like it went through a spaceship engine afterwards…

As I have said on the show, this isn’t really a distro and it isn’t really meant to be used by people other than me. It’s more about my personal choices in packages and desktop customisation than anything else and it is decidedly freedom-hating. It is also massively bloated, weighting in at around 976 MB, you could even call it Big Damn Linux in a way. I have learned a lot dabbling in creating this and will probably keep it up, if only to maintain my own versions for personal use. I am also looking at publishing a detailed howto article to document the process I’ve followed since a few people have expressed some interest in it. I will keep you posted on that endeavour. In the meantime, enjoy tinkering with the first release and file some bugs if you encounter any. Just remember to back up all of your stuff before downloading this!

openstreetmap.org

This is very, VERY last minute but we were contacted by some of the guys from OpenStreetMap about an event this weekend and I wanted to pass it on. We would have mentioned it on the show this week but unfortunately it was already too late by the time we heard. There’s a mapping party happening this weekend, 4-5th of April, in the Black Country, which isn’t at all as forboding as it sounds; in fact it’s a rather lovely place with some fine people, honest. It’s an area in the midlands of the United Kingdom – otherwise known as LugRadio country – and they hope to get as many people involved as possible improving OpenStreetMap data for it. The event is being held in The Public, West Bromwich and it’s sponsored by Cloudmade. So if you’ve got a bit of free time over the weekend, you’ve cut the grass, walked the dog and you’re kicking your heels. Why not have some fun and help map the area? You can find all the information you could need on their wiki. You don’t need any special skills, previous experience or equipment to get involved. The guys will sort you out, just turn up and say hello.

Apologies to our readers in other countries for whom this is probably a bit far to travel but you may be able to help OpenStreetMap map your area, wherever in the world that happens to be.

Thanks for reading and have a good weekend everyone,

Dan