Katian Crow
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!
April 17th, 2009 at 20:26
I am a bit confused by the name Katian, I understand the Kat bit but you are not called Ian
Now, katfab or katfabien or even katfabsh (maybe not!) I could get!
April 17th, 2009 at 20:30
Well, since the beginning letters of my first name kinda wreck any flow if inserted in the middle of a word, I chose to take the letters from the ending of my first name.
April 18th, 2009 at 05:35
But how is it pronounced?
For some reason, I want to pronounce it kay-she-un or kay-shin.
April 18th, 2009 at 09:59
Hey, Jezra! You can pronounce it like you see fit, I won’t mind.
Must be a crazy Yankee thing…
April 18th, 2009 at 21:37
Hi!
I can’t understand. What’s the point of making your own distro, if most part of software on it will be obsolete in half year.
Or is it going to be something like backup-distro, wich you will be able to use when you need install quickly and work without making any tuning? This way means that you must reassemble your distro regularly, isn’t it?
Sorry for my english. It would be better if I studied at school better
April 18th, 2009 at 22:18
Yes, I basically made this so that I don’t have to reapply all my customisations whenever I install a new system and as a live disc/dongle I can use in the field. Since “updating the distro” is mostly a case of running
aptitude dist-upgradeandremastersys dist, it isn’t massive work to keep the .iso current. A proper upgrade method is planned once I get into providing my configs via packages.April 19th, 2009 at 20:31
@fab – Nice work dude, I’m typing this on Crow right now. Haven’t seen a major bugs yet but if I do I’ll let you know
April 19th, 2009 at 20:33
Shiny! Glad it didn’t blow your system up!
April 23rd, 2009 at 00:21
Thanks for posting this for download. Not bad setup i like your app choice Fab. Runs great in VBox on my *gasp* iMac
April 23rd, 2009 at 08:54
Hehehehehe… Cool. Glad you like it. Seems like this would be useful to some people after all…
May 4th, 2009 at 04:34
i have not tried your distro yet, but i can’t help thinking it should be called fabuntu. just a thought. love the show, keep up the good work!!
May 4th, 2009 at 15:46
Thanks. Fabuntu occured to me too, but I didn’t want to have to clear such a pet project with Mark & the crew…
November 11th, 2009 at 11:53
[...] a quick note to everyone who had shown interest in this: I have now released version 0.01 of Katian. This release mirrors pretty much the state of my machine right now and I am putting it out for [...]
March 28th, 2010 at 20:28
[...] a quick note to everyone who had shown interest in this: I have now released version 0.01 of Katian. This release mirrors pretty much the state of my machine right now and I am putting it out for [...]