16. February 2010 by admin.

Just added the UKnow4Kids sites to the ArchWiki under “Live Arch systems.” Here’s the link.

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15. February 2010 by admin.

I just discovered this morning that UKnow4Kids has disappeared from SourceForge. I’ve emailed a support request, but for now it looks like downloading the ISO is impossible. I hope this clears up soon.

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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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24. January 2010 by admin.

The current core for UKnow4Kids is CrunchBang Lite, which runs the OpenBox windows manager. OpenBox is very attractive for its low system requirements, but as lite as CrunchBang is, there are still many MB of cruft I have to strip out to get UKnow4Kids to fit on to a CD. With some reluctance, I am considering changing the core distribution to SUSE Studio or Arch Linux. If I were really macho, I would immediately embrace Arch Linux for its ground-up configuration, but I don’t think I know enough Linux yet to handle an Arch configuration. I will still keep playing with Arch Linux to leave open the possibility of retaining OpenBox, but for the foreseeable future I have decided to change the core to SUSE Studio::openSUSE. SUSE Studio is a powerful (and easy) platform for rolling your own customized distribution, but it unfortunately does not have a default OpenBox configuration. Its lite windows manager configuration is IceWM, which is a bit too stripped down for my tastes. So, I have decided to use SUSE Studio’s openSUSE KDE 4 configuration as the core for UKnow4Kids. Using KDE 4 requires giving up on the design element specifying low hardware requirements, but someday I hope that I can return to OpenBox either through openSUSE or Arch Linux. Testing and evaluation (and learning) will continue on this front. Still, openSUSE should have excellent hardware support, and the KDE 4 interface will feel a more familiar to Windows users than OpenBox.

I hope to have a new version of UKnow4Kids with the openSUSE KDE 4 core out within the next 4 weeks. Hopefully, the new release will include version 9.1 of Gcompris.

The website will be updated with the new release.

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20. January 2010 by admin.

Today the UKnow4Kids blog goes live.  This blog will replace the earlier wiki hosted on Zoho and will contain news and commentary regarding the UKnow4Kids distribution.  The biggest change in the works is transitioning from CrunchBang Lite to SUSE Studio as the base distribution for UKnow4Kids.  The website will be updated and will have better site statistics tracking.

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