Flash Linux released

Urm, probably .. why ?

Wel you wouldn't would you, the distro is aimed at "users" .. ;)

That said (!) you can get a full list of packages sorted by license (along with all the licenses) from this location;

http://www.encryptec.net/flashlinux/flash031/index.html

CFLAGS is "-Os -march=i686 -pipe -fPIC -fomit-frame-pointer"

USE is huge and changes frequently at the moment. It's becoming less relevant with /etc/portage/package.use, which along with package.keywords which we make great use of.

Mmm, there are an many ways to implement a Linux distro on a USB key and I guess it depends on what your trying to achieve.

In this instance we're aiming at a generic distro with a 'wide' appeal. (read: to attract end users to Linux) In this vein;

AbiWord - looks good, and we did consider it in preference to OO. Unfortunately, it's simply not that compatible with other apps (like OO and M$ Word) hence not that great for the target audience. [I'm referring to whatever version is marked as stable in Gentoo - please don't flame, it simply failed the compatibility test]

Gimp - sure, great for web designers etc (I use it all the time!), and I wanted it there myself. Unfortunately it's about zero use to the average email checker / web browser. (and it's BIG!)

Gnome theme - I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I've not seen it. If someone can point me in it's general direction I'll take a look ..

Blue Cursors .. I thought at first it was just a but of fun .. I now find I prefer it to the default theme! That said, as of 0.3.2 /usr/share/cursors/xorg-x11/default/index.theme is a writable file, so feel free to change back to the default :)

Decent BIOS boot preferences out of the box would certainly be nice tho'... :)

Could I ask what the AbiWord compatibility test involved? We support almost as many, of not more formats than OOo.... Just wondering

Sure,

We loaded up a few random documents from OpenOffice (stuff we actually use like letters, reports etc) and in some cases the result was unusable. (and in some cases it looked ok)

Sounds a bit blunt, but that's the "end-user test" (!)

Simple documents looked Ok, but once we started on custom margins, frames, embedded graphics etc it started to wobble.

I would *love* to be able to offer a pure Gnome WP over OO, however I spent many years listening to users moan that OpenOffice wasn't close enough to Word to be usable ... :(

If you're interested in fixes then I could;
a. try to re-run the tests and give you some specific feedback
b. produce a flash linux variant with AbiWord/GNumeric instead of OO to see what people think (although I think Gnumeric was worse than Abi in terms of compatibility)

... ?

Urm,

I hate to tell you this, but gnumeric can't load complex OO spreadsheets. Just for example (!) I keep a spreadsheet to track how well my diet's going. A formatted list of dates, weights & body fat % etc.. (and of course a simple graph with a couple of trend lines)

On import, gnumeric loses the formatting for the tables and loses the graph completely.

This is a pretty basic test with a pretty basic spreadsheet!

For Linux users, 99% accuracy (or even 95%) is quite sustainable as users will typically be prepared to adapt to what works.

Users of other desktops (part of the intended audience) can be a little less flexible .. (!)

You'll notice I *wanted* to use a Gnome product (personally) and actually tried gnumeric very recently .. and found I wasn't prepared to compromise to the extent required. (and I'm a Linux user!)

That said:: I will be going back and trying the very latest versions and hopefully submitting a few test documents (probably when I've finished the next bug-fix release)

Ok, little test with an xls sheet.

1. The graph did import, but the style changed
2. Odd characters were inserted after each text label .. eg; "Day"
3. Date formatting was lost
4. Number formatting went from .2 dp to exp, fixed .3 dp was ok

Generally better than the OO import, but there are still formatting issues. That aside, many people have converted to OO, being M$ compatible and not OO compatible will certainly surprise people if not put them off.

I'm putting together an AbiWord/GNumeric version atm which should be released with the current 0.3.2 - I'll look forward to seeing how popular each is ... :)

Ok, this is much better when loading .doc files .. (!)

It'll be interesting to see how much smaller the non-OO key image is .. that said, is there an alternative to "impress" for powerpoint imitation ?

Currently, no. Work is done in this area, but no project is far enough to do any usefull work in.

Mmm, shame ..

I wonder if it's possible to split impress off from OO .. I suspect not but it might be worth looking in to ..

AbiWord/Gnumeric release should be out within 48 hours .. :)

Great ... as I use both AbiWord/Gnumeric and OO as well depending on what I'm working on.

Ok, but you'll need 2 keys :)

Looking at how flashlinux in installed on a key why can't you just add an extra tar archive to unpack over the the base on the key to add abiword and gnumeric? I know the total will exceed the 200MB but this would provide a choice.

Or provide a howto to add software to the base?

I'm a long time gnome fan/user but I still like making the gui look good. Gnome is a very good looking desktop as far as I am concerned.. one of the things I prefer in gnome over kde is the solid feeling interface.

Anyway.. those blue cursors are nice.. I've used them myself (in gnome). Keep em! they are perfectly usable and attractive..

Does the aproach this distro takes follow that of you typical Live CD? If thats the case the one should not have to worry about the number of writes. If that is not the case then I must ask why not?

Given the knowledge that /tmp /var/log have frequent write access why not just mount them into a 'tmp fs' like /dev/shm or something like that ... whole cares anout persistence after a reboot in /tmp any way?

Well, it's sort of a mixture, but /tmp and /var/log are both persistent at the moment.

It's a good point tho', certainly for /tmp tmpfs is probably a good option.

With regards to /var/log, I'm a great fan of being able to go back and look for the cause of a problem. If your /var/log vanishes every reboot, this makes life difficult.

The reason they're both persistent at the moment is simply that it's a first attempt and we're looking for as much debugging ammo as possible. Looking at the "write rate" for a single user workstation, I don't think either /tmp or /var/log will be an issue, certainly in the short term .. once we get to a stable version at the very least /tmp will go to tmpfs.

This is a good question!

Keys seem to be quoting around 1M writes per memory location .. (which is quite a few) , although it's possible to use this up very quickly with the wrong application.

Metalog is the current syslogger. It doesn't appear to hit the key unduly with writes, although you could turn it off if you want to. Temp files; again there shouldn't be anything that's likely to thrash the key .. if anything is found that does, then fsck should be able to bypass the bad block and we should be able to remove it from the distro.

(bear in mind that log files are cumulative, hence repeated writes to a log won't hit a single memory location)

I have a machine sat here on test (running off my key) and the activity light rarely flashes unless I'm doing something ..

I know I've been using this one key solidly for building and testing over the last three months. It includes > 20 complete wipedowns and reinstalls, and > 200 200Mb image rebuilds.. + many (many) hours of testing ...

I've not see a single bad block yet .. (!)

If anyone sees a problem along these lines, let me know!

Well, firstly USB drive speed varies from 1Mb/sec upwards.

My test key is a PQI which reads at around 8Mb/sec .. which is slower than some IDE drives to be sure .. however is is VERY usable (!)

If you have a look at the Kingston site, they're offering a key with 13Mb/sec transfer rates .. this should start to look more like an IDE drive in terms of speed .. I know IDE drives are getting quicker, but don't forget USB keys have a slightly faster seek time !!! ;-)

(Swap, you can always use the local swap drive if there is one!)

Hmm..

I don't appear to have this in the Gentoo distro (!)

Glider is installed in FlashLinux however .. I "thought" this was the current / preferred Gnome theme ?

I've been able to get X and fluxbox on a 256 zip disk but Gnome is much bigger. And here I'm getting a 1GB stick for Christmas :)

Sure,

There are a number of good/small distros out there, take DSL for example. The difference here is that we're talking a complete no-compromise Gnome system including Firefox, Evolution, Gaim, OpenOffice, XChat and even the likes of the gnome-volume-manager and HAL. (not to mention goodies like tcpdump, tsclient, vnc etc)

1G sticks are great, the only problem is cost, although I guess this will become less of an issue with time .. :)

Well, all the screen shots are off the system described and we're talking "under" 200 meg .. ;-)

It's a Gentoo based system, everything is optimised and compiled from source .. so there's nothing there that's not needed .. that said, there's no gaurentee that I've removed the odd file here and there that's required.. if you notice any, let me know.

Before you get worried, the system comes prelinked and without errors, so there are no missing shared libraries .. :)