You are currently browsing the UKnow4Kids Blog weblog archives for the day 28. January 2010.
28. January 2010 by admin.
After playing with both SUSE Studio and Arch Linux, I found to my surprise that Arch Linux provided me with enough documentation to build UKnow4Kids from the ground up, with LXDE/OpenBox as the windows manager and SLiM as the display manager, which are both lightweight and fast. SUSE Sudio would have been fine if I were not concerned with minimizing the UKnow4Kids system requirements, and it was just too difficult to reconfigure a SUSE Studio appliance into an LXDE/OpenBox configuration. In SUSE Studio’s favor was hardware support and vast software repositories. Arch Linux, on the other hand, was a different experience. Had it not been for good documentation at every step and a helpful community, it would have been impossible for me to build UKnow4Kids. Whereas SUSE Studio required working from the outside-in, Arch Linux forces you to work from the inside-out, adding software only as you need it.
As of now, UKnow4Kids has been completely configured around an Arch Linux core. My last major hurdle is to turn my UKnow4Kids installation (living in VirtualBox) into a live CD ISO for distribution. The tool of choice seems to be a utility called larch. With a little guidance from larch’s developer, I’m hoping creating the live CD will be more or less straightforward.
One especially nice feature of Arch Linux is its rolling release model. This means that for each release of UKnow4Kids, all I have to do is a system-wide update. I won’t have to do a rebuild with each major release.
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