--- Sensimilla Linux
---------------------------

"Little is beauty."

Hello, at start i'll say project is still in planning phase and
it is working as my homebox due last two years. I'll just point
here some things like goals of this project since some people
are asking me simple question "Why?".

Overview:

Main goal is to assemble system which will be lightweight as much
as possible but will work as functional desktop.
These days mainstream distros are rather aimed to create really
user friendly environments with all available bells and whistles
which sometimes causes lil confusion which packages we need to install
in case we found and working comp in our liftshaft and wanna
use it for some reason.

There are many available scenarios, i'll come up with recent one:

We are graphican and we have one full featured comp in house.
Wife is writting an important document and we have an job to do
with gimp. In that case we can have install sensimilla on second
slow comp and anyway run gimp cause system is striped just for that
purpose. Even that second comp is not bad then anyway we have more
free resources so we can easier work on big bitmaps.

System is mainly directed to slow machines but that doesnt mean it
will work only with those. There is big society which certainly
hates waste of resources, has no problem with old skool administration
via /etc dir and just likes light systems.

Goals:

I'll try to explain a bit future development way:

* main desktop will be enlightenment (E17)
* system will contain as much as possible artistic tools which means
  any image crating/processing stuff and also sound editing tools.
* artiscitc stuff here is maing goal and that MUST be stable,
  no experiments on this one. I saw distros where things like that
  were crashing but thats normal when enduser is different and they
  are taking care about services and development environment so
  artistic stuff is just an option. Here is no place for glitches
  with that kind of software.
* system is from scratch so is very open for new smarter solutions,
  everything which can make startup faster and/or decrease resources
  usage will be introduced.
* since system is dedicated to poor machines eg. when new xorg/mesa
  supports an new gfx card but has broken support for an older then
  it will be not upgraded till support for older card will be fixed.
  I'd situation like that when new xorg was possible to build with new
  mesa but there was no way to run dri on my old gfx card, all mainstream
  distros used new xorg so in case i were using one of those i couldn't
  be able to play quake :)
* system will contain also big set of basic tools like web browsers,
  email clients, instant messengers, text editors etc. which will allow
  to use it as an simple homebox.
* of course there will be also service soft but if it will be possible
  one lightweight version and one big. eg. lighttpd and apache.
  those will be here rather for testing purposes not to running
  an public available service, for that better to choose an mainstream
  distro focused on that.
* system is directed to advanced user so no place for any wizards.
  its simple, if you know what are you doing and why you want to use
  that then enjoy but if youre unsure then probably you need something
  different. reason is not difficult to understand, if system is more
  deterministic and striped then is higher chance to reach higher
  stablility and make it faster.
  

Package manager:

Currently there is something called 'sensimilla package manager' a.k.a
'spm' but its very dirty bash script. currently im rather trying to
develop package format and build script syntax, syntax is stolen from
RPM as its very good,smart and easy to learn but currently has not
implemented all features and i think it will differ a bit from RPM one
in future. 

Why:

At the end of this monologue i'll try to answer why.
Once when i had no connection to network for long time and i had installed
PLD (http://pld-linux.org/) which is big when i'd need an piece of soft
i was running to netcafe with cdr and downloading packages, at home
i've figured out that i've missed some dependencies. To solve that problem
i'd ran into cafe and downloaded LFS guide and heap of sources.
Not so far i've started to making an script which will help me with compilation
and will allow me to package stuff and at the same time will allow me to
uninstall packages. Well, it was growing everyday and i've caught idea to
make it public. I think there is still an big society in troubles which
for some reason cant upgrade their comp, they also in many times has 
gifts to many things and they want to develop them so thats dedicated exactly 
for them, if youre not one of them but you see any point in it then cheers.

TODO:

* clean up all specs in cvs, it means add descriptions, update versions.
  when all features in spec file syntax will be implemented then use them.
* finish basic version of package manager and in future rewrite it in c.
  also there is possiblity to add support for sensimilla package format to
  'smart package manager' but i was not testing it really and i cant know
  its behaviour with 1000+ packages installed.
* make an ISO with system base which allows to run install script or manual
  installation.
* start real work.


l00natyk@gazeta.pl