project MintEd2
Posted: Wed Aug 25, 2010 11:52 pm
Hi,
I'm thinking of starting up a bit of a spin off of Mint, a bit like Mint is to Ubuntu, is to Debian.
I would ideally like to feed as much back down the chain as possible, as so as to support rather than distract from Linux mint.
MintEd2 or Mint Editions^2 is a project to create a modular version of Mint, with restricted packages available (restricted by the modules) thus allowing for a high level of Quality Assurance along with the ability to easily customise the installation CD's and target the installed system to be more user / use and environment specific. Which should lend itself to being much more user friendly. Sometimes less is more.
There are really four main itches I want to scratch.
1: QA in ubuntu, well I'm not sure if there really is any. Mint is a lot better, MintEd2 will build upon this.
The intent is to have the ability to have more 'experimental' modules and other modules with higher levels of quality assurance and integration testing.
The base system will start of with the LTS versions of Mint, but run as a semi rolling release. Along with this the base install DVD/CD's as mastered by the user dependant on their selection of modules, will have bug fixes, including those in backports. As part of the live / installation CD/DVD that put together.
If find the policy of not pushing backports (such as the recient KDE release) down the line a little odd, when the release may contain only a few new features but have a huge number of bugs fixed. It is essentially a bug fix release with a few new features, and yet those bugs, which may even be critical, never end up on being fixed unless used chose to include backports repositories.
It's also my intent to have testing as wide open as possible, and push through updates to testes on their tests systems along with test scripts and all of the other QA practices that you would expect to find when producing quality, mass market software.
2: I just want it to work out of the box, not have a Live CD that can't connect to the internet, because a package such as usb_modeswitch for some reason isn't part of the live DVD, even though there's plenty of space left on the DVD.
So, the aim is, to have a system that works out of the box. All drivers, firmware and utilities required for hardware and hardware configuration that like that can just be distributed and setup automatically should be their (optionally removable from the various modules). But if it's not a licensing or copyright violation to have it setup automatically and aggregated then it should be done.
For other things, it may be possible for the user to self install the restricted drivers and such by installing the module and creating the live CD/DVD with those things setup and included. It should be possible to do something like jockey, but use it to actually build the Live CD/DVD that's then used for the installation.
For all other things, the system could quite possibly be provided on 2 separate disks to get around some of those issues. or possibly even just two partitions on the discs. (depending on licensing restrictions and mear aggregation policies)
Think of things like, LVM2, wifi drivers, binary firmware all that kind of stuff.
3: WISYWIG, or WYWIWYG.
It would be really nice if I could install things at live time and then have those things install when I hit install.
It would also be really nice if I could exclude things that are on the live CD/DVD from being installed.
And it would be really nice if settings and configuration could be picked up from existing environments on the users machine. This could be picking up the drivers that are needed for NDISWrapper from a Windows partition. Getting the network and internet settings by poking around in the windows registry or looking at existing Linux installs.
I'd like to be able to do this at both live time and install time, or boot time and I'm sure you can imagine the various ways this can be extended and such.
4: User / Community involvement.
I have quite a number of plans along these lines that I will talk about later.
Involvement could include things like buying products from a kickback store to help fund the project, or reporting bugs, or collecting useage and configuration data, or voting on what they would like to be worked on, all that kind of stuff. But nicely and optionally transparent to the user from within the operating environment. Not having to search on the internet and find some site, and setup an account etc....
This is one of the really big things, it would enable users to push through bug fixes, or ways of running windows applications under Wine, or what kind of packages (including 3rd party ones such as firefox plugins or openoffice extensions etc...) that they are using. Along with this would be added benifits to the user, such as monitoring for packages they have installed but haven't used for 6 months, or dependencies, or identifying which package is causing the system problems and looking for updates or roll-backs or just re-installing or checking the file sha1 checksum for corruption.
It could also give memory and performance requirements and suggestions for various packages and usage profiles and that kind of thing, as well as subtly suggesting new features, or documentation or drivers.
Anyhow,
What do you think, any comments additions, suggestions, support or wrist slapping.
Remember, the idea is to feed as much back as possible not to fork or distract.
This project will start off in one way or another as I'm setting up a charity and supporting company to provide those in need with computer systems and support and self training and all those kinds of things. And to do that I need a distro that has a much higher level of QA that most out their, a lot more stability and one that just works, works well and enables the system to be targeted at the user and not have the user wallowing in a million and one possible applications that they can install.
(application installation and filtering is a whole other topic, but it is in part involved with modules and 'super tags' and extending the DEB system to allow for some really funky and highly integrated stuff)
I'm thinking of starting up a bit of a spin off of Mint, a bit like Mint is to Ubuntu, is to Debian.
I would ideally like to feed as much back down the chain as possible, as so as to support rather than distract from Linux mint.
MintEd2 or Mint Editions^2 is a project to create a modular version of Mint, with restricted packages available (restricted by the modules) thus allowing for a high level of Quality Assurance along with the ability to easily customise the installation CD's and target the installed system to be more user / use and environment specific. Which should lend itself to being much more user friendly. Sometimes less is more.
There are really four main itches I want to scratch.
1: QA in ubuntu, well I'm not sure if there really is any. Mint is a lot better, MintEd2 will build upon this.
The intent is to have the ability to have more 'experimental' modules and other modules with higher levels of quality assurance and integration testing.
The base system will start of with the LTS versions of Mint, but run as a semi rolling release. Along with this the base install DVD/CD's as mastered by the user dependant on their selection of modules, will have bug fixes, including those in backports. As part of the live / installation CD/DVD that put together.
If find the policy of not pushing backports (such as the recient KDE release) down the line a little odd, when the release may contain only a few new features but have a huge number of bugs fixed. It is essentially a bug fix release with a few new features, and yet those bugs, which may even be critical, never end up on being fixed unless used chose to include backports repositories.
It's also my intent to have testing as wide open as possible, and push through updates to testes on their tests systems along with test scripts and all of the other QA practices that you would expect to find when producing quality, mass market software.
2: I just want it to work out of the box, not have a Live CD that can't connect to the internet, because a package such as usb_modeswitch for some reason isn't part of the live DVD, even though there's plenty of space left on the DVD.
So, the aim is, to have a system that works out of the box. All drivers, firmware and utilities required for hardware and hardware configuration that like that can just be distributed and setup automatically should be their (optionally removable from the various modules). But if it's not a licensing or copyright violation to have it setup automatically and aggregated then it should be done.
For other things, it may be possible for the user to self install the restricted drivers and such by installing the module and creating the live CD/DVD with those things setup and included. It should be possible to do something like jockey, but use it to actually build the Live CD/DVD that's then used for the installation.
For all other things, the system could quite possibly be provided on 2 separate disks to get around some of those issues. or possibly even just two partitions on the discs. (depending on licensing restrictions and mear aggregation policies)
Think of things like, LVM2, wifi drivers, binary firmware all that kind of stuff.
3: WISYWIG, or WYWIWYG.
It would be really nice if I could install things at live time and then have those things install when I hit install.
It would also be really nice if I could exclude things that are on the live CD/DVD from being installed.
And it would be really nice if settings and configuration could be picked up from existing environments on the users machine. This could be picking up the drivers that are needed for NDISWrapper from a Windows partition. Getting the network and internet settings by poking around in the windows registry or looking at existing Linux installs.
I'd like to be able to do this at both live time and install time, or boot time and I'm sure you can imagine the various ways this can be extended and such.
4: User / Community involvement.
I have quite a number of plans along these lines that I will talk about later.
Involvement could include things like buying products from a kickback store to help fund the project, or reporting bugs, or collecting useage and configuration data, or voting on what they would like to be worked on, all that kind of stuff. But nicely and optionally transparent to the user from within the operating environment. Not having to search on the internet and find some site, and setup an account etc....
This is one of the really big things, it would enable users to push through bug fixes, or ways of running windows applications under Wine, or what kind of packages (including 3rd party ones such as firefox plugins or openoffice extensions etc...) that they are using. Along with this would be added benifits to the user, such as monitoring for packages they have installed but haven't used for 6 months, or dependencies, or identifying which package is causing the system problems and looking for updates or roll-backs or just re-installing or checking the file sha1 checksum for corruption.
It could also give memory and performance requirements and suggestions for various packages and usage profiles and that kind of thing, as well as subtly suggesting new features, or documentation or drivers.
Anyhow,
What do you think, any comments additions, suggestions, support or wrist slapping.
Remember, the idea is to feed as much back as possible not to fork or distract.
This project will start off in one way or another as I'm setting up a charity and supporting company to provide those in need with computer systems and support and self training and all those kinds of things. And to do that I need a distro that has a much higher level of QA that most out their, a lot more stability and one that just works, works well and enables the system to be targeted at the user and not have the user wallowing in a million and one possible applications that they can install.
(application installation and filtering is a whole other topic, but it is in part involved with modules and 'super tags' and extending the DEB system to allow for some really funky and highly integrated stuff)