Arabbix Status

[Anmar Oueja <anmar at canada dot com>]

Hello All:

I have been getting lots of commends and questions about Arabbix 
expected release date. Well I was planning on release Arabbix 0.8.1 on 
April 13th but that date came and gone.

After looking At Arabbix 0.8, I decided to put it in the past and start 
working on a fresh Live CD using the new morphix base module and an 
update BareX module.

Starting from such a low state meant lots of customization and testing 
to make sure it is as good as if not better than Arabbix 0.8.1.

After some testing, I found out that the current base module has a major 
bug in passing the language from the boot loader (in this case GRUB) to 
the main module (Arabbix). This prompted a bit of Q and A with the 
morphix team, which ended up in me downloading a new base module that 
will replace all present base modules.

Great News... you might thin. Hold on the plot thickens ;). After 
getting the new base system, I found that the init scripts require some 
work since they are specifically tailored to KDE (yuck :)) so I have to 
do some hacking and hand the patches back to the morphix guys so the 
same CD can also handle GNOME language set-up. Such a hack is going take 
me some time until I get familiar with the code.

So why am I doing all this work. Simple really. I want to make sure the 
the 0.8.1 release is as solid as possible since it will be the base I 
will build 0.9 (GNOME 2.6) on it. In addition, I want the entire 
remastering system to be clear, effective and automated and documented 
as much as possible unlike Arabbix 0.8

Does that mean that Arabbix 0.8.1 sucks ? Not really. It will not be as 
flashy as 0.8 but will have a much better hardware detection, be 
auto-remastering friendly and have gnome 2.4 (not too bad, I say :)). 
You can think of Arabbix 0.8.1 as a test release prior to going to 0.9

Once 0.8.1 is out, I will be hunting through all the current bug reports 
and the ones I get from 0.8.1.

Great.... so when do I expect to see 0.8.1 ? Arabbix 0.8.1 will be out 
very shortly (less than two weeks I am hoping). Sorry I can not provide 
a deadline since I am not sure what other tech or none tech issues I 
might be faced with. You can monitor the progress of Arabbix and the 
blog by checking :

http://www.arabbix.org/~anmar/arabbix/

Arabbix 0.8.1 might not be all you want, but I promise you that Arabbix 
0.9 will impress you.

Hope this covers it, If you have any more questions, don't hesitate to ask.

Salam

Anmar