Debian Pure Blends

Contents

  1. Terminology
  2. Communication
  3. News
  4. Blends released with Squeeze
  5. Debian internal projects which might profit from the Blends effort
  6. Debian external projects which might be interested in the Blends effort
  7. Tools or projects that might be interesting to adopt in the Debian Pure Blends scope
  8. Common Issues for Blends
    1. Automatic installation
    2. Installing the list of packages we want
    3. Preconfigure the packages we install
    4. Automatic X configuration
    5. CD building
    6. Configure default language for all users
    7. Making simpler KDE / GNOME (XFree86) reaching and menus
  9. See also

Terminology

Pure Blend
a subset of Debian that is configured to support a particular target group out-of-the-box. One way to understand this is a list of packages that gets installed to provide a focus of use.

Blend
a Debian-based distribution that is, or wants to become, a Pure Blend - i.e. has as an explicit goal of improving Debian as a whole, consequently all extras they offer will either become part of Debian, or are temporary workarounds to solve a need of the target group which can't be solved within Debian yet.

Flavor
upon installation of a Blend there often is a choice, depending on the particular use, about what set of defaults to use. A flavor is the name of such a set. (e.g. Skolelinux has flavors for main-server, workstation, and thin-client-server)

Subproject
group of people within Debian working together on a common purpose. In most cases this common purpose is either some specific functionality (e.g. debian-multimedia) or a Blend (e.g. debian-science).

Derivative
a distribution based on Debian, no matter its goals - e.g. Ubuntu is a derivative; Debian Edu is a Debian Blend and also a Debian Derivative.

Please see also:

Communication

Mailing list: discussions about Blends currently take place on debian-blends@lists.debian.org mailing list.

IRC: #debian-blends channel at irc.debian.org is present.

Wiki: used to document the outcome of discussions on the mailing list.

Discussion page: this wiki page can also be discussed at ?DebianPureBlends/Discussion

News

Blends released with Squeeze

If you get Squeeze the following Blends are contained:

Debian internal projects which might profit from the Blends effort

Debian external projects which might be interested in the Blends effort

Tools or projects that might be interesting to adopt in the Debian Pure Blends scope

(may be more here http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Debian/installers.html )

Common Issues for Blends

Automatic installation

Using the new DebianInstaller and a few hooks to get the partitioning we want and the packages we want installed into the hard drive. I'm fairly satisfied with this solution.

Installing the list of packages we want

Using metapackages (i.e. packages consisting only of dependencies) to install the packages we want. Used hooks in base-config to get them installed during first time installation. Not too happy about the metapackage approach, as it is fragile and breaks easily if some dependency is unavailable.

Preconfigure the packages we install

Using three different approaches:

  1. use modularized/multilevel configuration where available (desktop-profiles, /etc/apache/conf.d, ...),
  2. Load answers into the debconf database before the packages are installed using some home-make script, and
  3. rewrite/replace configuration files using cfengine at the end of the installation if the package is unable to configure what we want using debconf.

I'm fairly satisfied with this solution, but am not sure if the method used to feed the debconf database is the best available. I believe the best option would be to extend all the packages we use to make it possible to configure everything we need using debconf answers, when they can't be made to do modularized/multilevel configuration.

Automatic X configuration

Using home-brewed script filling the debconf database, and then call dexconf from the XFree86 package to generate the configuration file.

The Hardware detection info is fetched from various packages (discover, detect, etc).

CD building

Using a heavily patched version of debian-cd to create the CDs. Most of the patches is to include the d-i boot floppies. This should now be possible with the standard version of debian-cd, but no one in Skolelinux have taken the time to update our copy of the scripts.

Note Also take a look at DebianCustomCD and DebianInstaller/Build. These provide instructions for the building of the actual cd's (rather than meta packages, and most of the other issues mentioned in this page)

Configure default language for all users

Using a custom script to rewrite config files to modify the default language/locale.

Making simpler KDE / GNOME (XFree86) reaching and menus

Make a simpler way to select the window desktop manager for XFree86 (KDE/GNOME) by default or by selection on screen by the user (in a similar way to the LILO / Grub boot screens to select to partition to boot).

Working on a system to make simple menus and change the menu depending on the user's group membership.

Working on the direct use of KDE programs in GNOME and vice versa (in a similar way to Alien).

See also

CategoryDeveloper