What is the purpose of the OneLinux project?

Discussion in 'Linux' started by Cyclone42, Oct 12, 2008.

  1. Cyclone42

    Cyclone42

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    The way I see it, I can't think of any reason why this project should continue to exist.

    I've been hanging out in the OneLinux IRC channel for the past few of weeks, and there has been no activity whatsoever. By time anything comes of this project, all of the major distributions will have caught up to supporting the hardware used for the Aspire One, and the AAO will be supported out-of-box by just about everything, making OneLinux pretty much irrelevant.

    The way I see it, the most useful thing for this project to do, IMO, would be to change the project from being it's own distribution, to being an upgrade package for Ubuntu; something like the Netbook Remix project, but AAO-specific.
     
    Cyclone42, Oct 12, 2008
    #1
  2. Cyclone42

    donec

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    I just got an email from Tiago (owner of Onelinux) and he is saying that at this point he thinks he will be releasing a new version in a couple days. The best thing about Onelinux is that I have not had to go in and do a bunch of terminal work to get the things I want like wifi to work consistently in fact the only things not working right from the beta 1 version is the suspend, SD card reader and system sound (music works fine).
     
    donec, Oct 12, 2008
    #2
  3. Cyclone42

    kevin

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    The idea of a custom Linux distro for the AA0, that does all the things the original does plus a load of things it doesn't, is a good idea in principle. In practice, I've found that no individual, or small group of individuals, has enough hours in the day to keep it up to date, even if a functional initial release can be made.

    I've been involved in projects like this myself, but I've found that the people who have the skills to do the necessary work tend to have jobs and families (as I do). Ten years ago this sort of stuff would have been done by students; but these days students are all too busy doing menial jobs to pay their fees to play around with computers in their time outside classes.

    I have myself come in for the same sort of criticism that is being levels at the OneLinux folks here. But, in the end, family and work (in that order) come first, and everybody else just has to be patient.

    I'd also point out that comments such as ``I can't think of any reason why this project should continue to exist.'' are not going to motivate the developers, none of whom are making anything out of this personally, to a higher level of effort. Quite the opposite, I should think.
     
    kevin, Oct 12, 2008
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  4. Cyclone42

    mh-

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    Even if everything turns out to work perfectly once Intrepid is released there will always be room for custom tweaks to optimize things like boot times and/or performance. While there may not be a *need* for a full-fledged distribution it might still be a fun project for those involved with it. And if it turns out that they just don't have the spare time to manage a full distribution (even a forked one requires a massive effort) the project could still f.ex. provide a .deb repository for easy installation of whatever tweaks people come up with (like you suggested)... But that's really up to the maintainers, it's their project after all ;). Either way, it will have a reason to exist as long as the maintainers enjoy what they are doing. If others find use for their work - even better.

    Just remember that a hobby project should always be about having fun and/or learning new things (hopefully both). When people start demanding too much it turns into work - and that could be fine provided you get paid for it ;).
     
    mh-, Oct 12, 2008
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  5. Cyclone42

    mgmayo27

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    If DKMS is properly implemented into a customized distro for the One, then there would never be any hardware issue. As far as software, you can always just add repositories from official distros, if they're not already added (in the case of One Linux, I'm sure that most of the official Ubuntu repositories are included). If that's the case, then the system should be prompted to run the OS update whenever it's available (like, moving from 8.04 to 8.10).
     
    mgmayo27, Oct 14, 2008
    #5
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