arabbix discussion

["Dr.Dre" <pharon at gmail dot com>]

salamo 3aleekom. Hi all and happy feast. Sorry for picking up so late
on this thread but I was busy.

I am the maker of the "Phaeronix" livecd. It's a livecd based on LFS (
linux from scratch ) where you build everything from source.

The main features were improved knoppix hardware detection and easy
customizability. Being based on the linux-live scripts it was easy to
make modules.

Now it has evolved and I am building a new version based on gentoo.
Now before everyone runs away expecting things to get optimized to
hell, I don't do optimizations above the stable -O2.

Gentoo has the advantage of the portage system which brings order to
the compilation mess, and makes it easy to update/upgrade systems. The
only drawback is the long time of compilation. However it makes up for
that with the sheer flexibility to build whatever you want. Just write
an ebuild and emerge it.

Currently I am placing the finishing touches on an alpha version, it
has the highlghts of : gnome-2.9.4, ximian openoffice, evolution-2.2,
blender, gimp-2.2, inkscape-0.4, mozilla-firefox nightly, gaim,
working mplayer, and mp3 player.

Also on the arabic front: it uses UTF-8 locale, arabeyes core fonts,
katoob, and a working bicon+gnome-terminal. If any more arabeyes
software is needed, I'd love to add them. No branding has been done
yet, I had no artwork for phaeronix anyway.

The hardware detection will still be based on knoppix's, so updating
in sync with new knoppix releases should be easy.

Also the linux-live scripts will be used, which use squashfs for
superior compression and optimized IO access on the liveCD. The new
UnionFS is used for overlaying the CD in writable mode which gives a
lot of freedom ( whole CD pseudo-writable ).

Kernel is a specially optimized kernel for dektops, which should give
a speed boost too.

I hope I didn't speak too long. Looking forward to cooperation with you.

EGLUG member
Islam Amer, phaeron
http://www.phaeronix.net