Apr 17 2009

Katian Crow

Posted by Fab

crowAs 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!

katian

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Oct 13 2007

A Week of Distributions

Posted by Dan

Hey folks, my first blog post here. I thought it was time I posted something so here it is :)

As you will know by now the new version of Ubuntu is due out in the next week, that big banner on the sidebar may have given it away. So I plan to spend the next week trying out a new Linux distribution each day to see how I get on before eventually moving to Ubuntu 7.10. I’ve tried a few different distributions in the past but since moving to Ubuntu about a year ago, I have be honest, I haven’t tried much else, certainly not outside of VMware. I guess I got comfortable and just didn’t bother. Since I will be upgrading my system to the new Ubuntu anyway, now seems like a good time to take a little tour of the Linux world and see what’s happening. I can’t promise it will be comprehensive with so many distributions out there though, I can’t try them all in a week so I’ve made a hit list of the major ones I want to try out:

PCLinuxOS 2007 - Never tried this but heard about it quite a lot.

OpenSuSE 10.3 - As much as I hate the Microsoft/Novell deal I have used SuSE in the past and it was my first ever Linux distribution so I owe it another chance.

Mandriva 2008 - Another distribution that has been an old friend to me, the new 2008 version is fresh out this week so I figured I’d try it.

Slackware 12 - I’ve never used Slackware but it has a strong following and has been around a long time. Can’t wait to see what it’s like.

Fedora 7 - This disc has been sat on my desk for ages, I’ve used Fedora and Red Hat many times in the past, the last version I used was Fedora 5 so it’s been a while.

Debian Etch - Lastly I will try out Debian, the distribution which has spawned so many others including Ubuntu of course. I’ve used it on the odd server but never on my desktop, it has a reputation as the purists OS, awkward to use but powerful. We’ll see.

So that’s about it, I missed a few obvious ones I know. Gentoo is not in there basically because I’m not a sadist and I don’t want to compile everything. I have used Sabayon before which is supposed to be the easy to use version of Gentoo but I didn’t bother with it in this experiment as I figured I have enough on my plate.

So that’s it, I’ve backed up my /home partition with rsync and I’m almost ready to go, just got some md5 sums to check and some discs to burn and then I’m off. Wish me luck, I will report back… I hope ;)

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