The Unity Linux project is pleased to announce its first candidate for release, 2010 RC1. We have taken the last nine weeks to provide many needed fixes and continual updates to the core offering of our software. Check the Downloads page to get the 32 bit and 64 bit LiveCDs.

Changelog:

• Updated xorg to 1.7.5
• New kernel version 2.6.31.12. Due to several regressions with the current 2.6.32 kernels, it was decided to stay with the 2.6.31.12 kernel for this release with the 2.6.33 to be released in the repo once the first update is released (2.6.33.1).
• Filetriggers and other minor bugs were fixed for rpm5.
• Smart 1.3 and the addition of smart-utils for mirror automation. The mirror selection is now automated based on system localization for optimum performance. David of Unity-linux is now a contributor to the Smart development team in order to ensure the best user experience.

We have made a large effort to find additional mirrors around the world for hosting our repository and LiveCD ISOs. In the process of finding mirrors, we have adopted the MirMon project for monitoring the status of our mirrors. Users can now go the Mirror Status page to find the best download location as well as the health of the various mirrors.

The repositories now contain many full fledged up to date Desktop Environments which can be installed with the use of the “task” meta-packages. Recent additions include:

• KDE 4.4.1 from Synergy Linux,
• Gnome 2.28.1,
• Openbox 3.4.11 from TinyMe,
• XFCE 4.6.1 from Qua It & SAM,
• E17 0.16.999.063 from UnitE17

Our resources are now focused on cleaning up of our documentation and the continued bug squashing in preparation for the final release.

Known issues:

• The kernel 2.6.31.12 breaks support for the wireless controller Atheros AR2413 (ath5k module). Using an older kernel in the repository fixes that issue.  A resolution to this currently being worked on.
• The smart-setup tool menu entry has not been designed and implemented. The initial setup is automatic, therefore, running this tool isn’t required unless the user wishes to specify a particular mirror.
• The ATI proprietary driver does not support xorg-1.7. It has been removed from the repository to prevent unnecessary problems for users.
• VMWare users may experience a several minute start-up delay due to an error with udev.

About Unity Linux:
Mandriva-based Unity Linux utilizes the MkLiveCD project, which allows developers to create their own distribution on top of a Unity Linux core (or “trunk”). Unity Linux thus strives to provide a solid, well maintained foundation that developers can use as a starting point to build their own “remastered” distributions, or as we like to call them, “branches.” Currently, Unity Linux offers both 32-bit and 64-bit LiveCDs. Over 7,700 packages are available after installation. In an effort to give distribution developers maximum flexibility, the core is kept small and usable, but not too basic. Unity Linux provides developers with the bare minimum– just enough to make use of remaster tools, the smart package manager, a 2.6.31.12 kernel, and rpm5. To facilitate easy access to packages, Unity Linux utilizes an SVN repository for packages and internal projects. All the necessary tools as well as a basic tutorial for building packages are already provided. An automatic build system to work with the SVN repository is in progress along with many other tools to make Unity the most functional project to start a personal or professional branch.

As many of you have noticed, we have been adding repository mirrors daily around here gearing up for our release candidate phase of Unity Linux.  Since internationalization is a HUGE priority for us, we’ve been adding mirrors to as many places as we can find in the various parts of the world.  However, since we’ve been adding mirrors, we’ve realized that keeping tabs on them is rather difficult.  After all, what happens when you normally use the German mirror but it’s down?  Then where do you go? What happens if the mirror is out of synch?  How do you know?

Enter Arch Linux and the fantastic community members they have.

Some of our devs love running Arch Linux as a secondary OS on their machines. They love the simplicity of it. They love the smallness of it. It’s Arch that has inspired many of our developers to shoot for that minimalistic OS wrapped around the LiveCD utilities. It’s Arch that we looked to as an example of a successful project.  Those devs keep eyes peeled on developments within the Arch community…and those devs knew as mirrors increased, they wanted to track mirrors like Arch does.

So, we asked about it. Arch was kind enough to share how they make their mirror status pages. We’d like to thank them for being so helpful and inspirational to us here at Unity. We’d also like to thank gri6507 and devnet for doing the work to incorporate what Arch had done into Unity Linux into our website.

I give you the Unity Linux Mirror Status Page!

As mirrors are added, they will be reflected here and their status will be reflected.  This includes whether they are down or latent and divides things up into regional areas of interest.  We hope this serves the community well.  We have set it to update about every hour.  Hopefully, this is frequent enough.  We’ve also updated our navigation at the top of the page to reflect our latest resource addition.  Please let us know in the comments section what else is important to you as far as mirrors and their status goes…we’ll continue to improve as we go along toward the Release Candidate phase of Unity!  Thanks!

The development team at Unity Linux has implemented a new tool for checking dependency errors of their packages. This tool can be run both manually and automatically as part of our synchronization with the main repo . Once analysis is complete, the generated reports are automatically emailed to our Quality Assurance team which can then address the issues. The public nature of these reports puts a spot light on any packaging problems that may exist which guarantees quick resolution of any problems. What does all of this mean to our end users? Simply put, this ensures a clean environment where every package is installable!

Two new USA mirrors have been added:

University of Idaho

• http://mirror.its.uidaho.edu/pub/unity
• ftp://mirror.its.uidaho.edu/unity
• rsync://mirror.its.uidaho.edu::unity

Virginia Tech

• http://mirror.cs.vt.edu/pub/unity/

This brings our list of mirrors to thirteen.  Thank you so much!

You can view our complete list of servers on our wiki: http://wiki.unity-linux.org/mirrors

A number of other institutions have been contacted, and we’re awaiting their reply.  If you know of any others who may be interested, please let us know on our mailing list (ul-developers at googlegroups.com), via a comment to this blog or by any other means.

We finally got to setup a fund for Unity. To ensure transparency, we setup the fund through pledgies (http://pledgie.com).

We will shortly setup a proper table of expenses / funds received but you can look at the current info on http://wiki.unity-linux.org/finances. All transactions will be recorded there and be available for anyone to view.

You can donate at http://pledgie.com/campaigns/8140

Thank you all for your support.

Gett.

Thanks to sneekylinux for this quick look at Unity Linux 2010 Beta 2:

The Unity Linux project is pleased to announce its second beta
release, 2010 Beta 2. We have taken the last four weeks to provide
many needed fixes and continual updates to the core offering of our
software.

Changelog:
- Updated xorg to 1.7.3
- Fixed aufs2 for gvfs support (only effected Gnome in livecd mode)
- New kernel version 2.6.31.9
- Additional firmware
- Ndiswrapper module is fixed and working with kernels > 2.6.30
Overall there are about 200 updates since beta1

Known issues:
- Rpm5 filetriggers is not fixed yet so we still need to use
chksession -g (for gdm) or -K (for kdm4) to register new Desktop
Environment.
- Xorg-1.7.3 is not yet supported by the ATI proprietary driver, so do
not attempt to try it.
- The unstable channel is still enabled on the 32bit iso. This
channel is now obsolete since xorg-1.7.3 has been pushed into the main
repo so users are asked to delete this particular channel.

Mandriva-based Unity Linux utilizes the MkLiveCD project, which allows
developers to create their own distribution on top of a Unity Linux
core (or “trunk”). Unity Linux thus strives to provide a solid, well
maintained foundation that developers can use as a starting point to
build their own “remastered” distributions, or as we like to call
them, “branches.”

Currently, Unity Linux offers both 32-bit and 64-bit LiveCDs. Nearly
7,700 packages are available after installation. In an effort to give
distribution developers maximum flexibility, the core is kept small
and usable, but not too basic. Unity Linux provides developers with
the bare minimum– just enough to make use of remaster tools, the
smart package manager, a 2.6.31.9 kernel, and rpm5.

To facilitate easy access to packages, Unity Linux utilizes an SVN
repository for packages and internal projects. All the necessary tools
as well as a basic tutorial for building packages are already
provided. An automatic build system to work with the SVN repository is
in progress along with many other tools to make Unity the most
functional project to start a personal or professional branch.

Check our Downloads page to get the 32 bit and 64 bit LiveCDs.

The Unity Linux project is pleased to announce its first beta release, 2010 Beta 1.

Mandriva-based Unity Linux utilizes the MkLiveCD project, which allows developers to create their own distribution on top of a Unity Linux core (or “trunk”). Unity Linux thus strives to provide a solid, well maintained foundation that developers can use as a starting point to build their own “remastered” distributions, or as we like to call them, “branches.”

Currently, Unity Linux offers both 32-bit and 64-bit LiveCDs. Nearly 7,000 packages are available after installation. In an effort to give distribution developers maximum flexibility, the core is kept small and usable, but not too basic. Unity Linux provides developers with the bare minimum– just enough to make use of remaster tools, the smart package manager, a 2.6.31.6 kernel, and rpm5.

To facilitate easy access to packages, Unity Linux utilizes an SVN repository which also houses internal projects. All the necessary tools as well as a basic tutorial for building packages are already provided via our documentation wiki. An automatic build system to work with the SVN repository is in progress along with many other tools to make Unity the most functional project to start a personal or professional branch.

Check our Downloads page to get the 32 bit and 64 bit LiveCDs.

The main tools used by developers for many LiveCD distributions was facing stagnation in 2008.  Unity Linux has taken up the torch for bringing this great tool into the 21st century.

What is liveCD?

From berlios.de project page:

The LiveCD project is dedicated to providing you with tools to create your own LiveCD from a currently installed Linux distribution. It can be used to create your own distribution, specialised CD, or to put together a demo disk to show off the power of our favourite OS.  The LiveCD project is dedicated to providing you with tools to create your own LiveCD from a currently installed Linux distribution. It can be used to create your own distribution, specialised CD, or to put together a demo disk to show off the power of our favourite OS.

The last activity on the development mailing lists was on December 2008.

Livecd, PCLinuxOS, and Unity Linux

LiveCD, the core project behind the remasterme and mklivecd functions for many distributions, was maintained by mostly people from Mandriva and then later, PCLinuxOS.  The project was maintained until 2007 by some people you may know of like : Buchan Milne, Pierre-Henri RAMBOZ, Paul Grinberg, Ivan Kerekes, Jaco Greeff, ocilent1, Tom Kelly, Jeremiah Summers, and Texstar.

When Unity looked to move forward with LiveCD, we found that project was not dead  but it was lagging woefully behind current kernel versions and features.  LiveCD had one maintainer in Pierre-Henri RAMBOZ (didouph) in 2008 and no new version of PCLinuxOS to test things in.  Texstar had taken a leave of absence and thus OS integration wasn’t being tested with committed code.  Something needed to happen or LiveCD would go inactive which, subsequently, would lock PCLinuxOS (and thus Unity Linux) at lower kernel versions and any pushes to the future they might make.

In early 2009, Didouph and Paul Grinberg helped us form the Unity Linux team.  With a team of over 25 developers, we felt that we could contribute back to LiveCD and in the process help out other distributions that use the code base…we realized quickly that in order to get past the 2.6.28 kernels, we’d need to heavily alter the code.  While making this improvement we decided to make a bunch of others and since we were actively working on these changes and are actively working on other changes right now, it makes sense for us to heavily contribute and maintain it.

So What Have You Done With LiveCD So Far?

Glad you asked.  We’ve been VERY busy with making sure it works for us well into the future.  A full list of changes are linked at the bottom of this article.

• Support for kernels greater than 2.6.28

This is a major stopping point for any of the distributions currently using LiveCD for their projects.  We recognized this problem right away and have been working on fixing and testing vs. getting a release out the door.  We wanted the benefits of later kernels (wireless and support for more hardware) so working on this aspect of LiveCD took precedence over everything when we first began with the project.

• Increased Hardware Detection

The old LiveCD project used hwdetect to scan and detect hardware.  This did a good job in the past but we wanted to give LiveCD the ability to scale for the future.  We ported hardware detection over to harddrake from Mandriva.  This not only does a better job with detection, it also works properly with later kernels as well as liveCD operation (mounting, etc).  This was also a major stoppage for us…once we moved to the new kernels and udev the old method didn’t work.  This was changed purely out of necessity because we really didn’t want to change it as it worked well on PCLinuxOS and also worked well on initial builds of Unity Linux.

• 64-bit Support

Our developers have added in support for 64-bit support for LiveCD.  That means you’ll be able to have a 64-bit liveCD and the ability to remaster 64-bit versions.  We’ve worked hard on this because Unity Linux needs the ability to be a core…and that core may not be limited to the desktop only and 64-bit is definitely a plus for a server distribution.  We’re pretty sure this won’t make anyone angry   64-bit support has not been committed to SVN for LiveCD as of the writing of this news article but will be shortly.

• il8n compliance

Team Unity has many members that speak languages other than English.  We’ve been committed to making sure Unity is available in many languages…after all, a core shouldn’t be only an English speaking core right?  Gianvacca worked hard on making this a reality:

mkremaster and liveusb scripts are now i18n-compliant.  I rearranged the directory tree to better separate the files needed for mklivecd localisation and the files needed for liveusb localisation. To easily provide translation of the desktop files too, these are not created within the spec file, but generated by intltool taking the information contained in the po files.  The only supported languages at the moment are Italian and Hungarian (2 languages our developers speak) .  However the po files need to be updated for some refreshed Unity-specific strings.

So the foundation has been laid to provide support and open doors for LiveCD in many other countries for users speaking many different languages.

• LiveCD Image Editing

Imagine a developer making an ISO file and then suddenly realizing they forgot to make some last minute changes.  With LiveCD image editing, they could open up the ISO file and make changes to it…they wouldn’t have to rebuild it.  Unity Linux developer Onkel Ho is currently working out this ability for LiveCD.

• Lzma Compression Support

Sam-Nico of SAM Linux has been helping out in various areas with Unity Linux as well and he has added in Lzma support for LiveCD.  In the past, compression for LiveCD uses gzip.  Lzma was patched previously but wasnt’ fully integrated into LiveCD.  We’ve worked on making it integrated.  By switching to lzma, developers will be able to cram more things into an ISO for everyone.  The only downside to lzma compression is that it uses a bit more memory when booting up.  Team Unity felt this was a good trade off for most developers…please note that gzip compression has not been removed so distributions like TinyME will still be able to use it.

So, Where’s LiveCD Code?

Anything we work on is available for everyone to see at http://svn.unity-linux.org

LiveCD SVN specifically can be found at this link.

Click here for a full list of changes in LiveCD

Why Didn’t You Just Keep SVN Where it Was at Berlios?

We thought about doing that but it was easier to get all our devs working on things by using our own SVN and not having to setup more user accounts and worry about access.  We have plans to setup an external SVN and move the code there ASAP.  External could be anywhere…if you have suggestions, please get involved (read below)!

So How Can I Get Involved With Development?

Join the Unity Linux Developers Google Group and let everyone know you want to help out!  Currently, our SVN is limited (only commits by Unity Linux developers) but as we move forward with LiveCD development, we’ll be trying to move to an external repository so that more people can work independent from Unity Linux on it.  In the meantime, anyone, and we mean anyone (We’re looking at you PCLinuxOS guys and gals!) can join up and help out or even just lurk and give us your opinion on current features, future plans, etc.  Thanks for your interest on LiveCD!

The PLF folks have been very kind to us and have provided Unity with user accounts and server space on their mirrors. This allows us to upload and distribute packages in order to avoid conflict with patenting laws or legal restrictions in various countries.

PLF stands for Penguin Liberation Front and is a packaging project dedicated to distributing software that cannot be included in Linux distributions for various reasons, related to geographical variations in legislation regarding intellectual property, licensing,  security and other issues.

So, be sure to keep a heads up for new packages in the channels to install on the latest developer snapshots. (Note: Developer Snapshots only!) Also, be sure to install the smart-channels-plf package to enable the plf channel in the Smart packaging manager, using the following command as root:

smart install smart-channels-plf

To find your own PLF-mirror, take a look at http://plf.zarb.org/mirrors.php

Thanks for using Unity Linux and sticking with us as we work to get a public beta released