TinyMe Latest News

The majority of my time is spent packaging applications for PCLinuxOS. Not working on TinyMe? No, not working on TinyMe. I'm usually found sitting in front of either Medit or Kate, working on one package or another.

Okay, okay, most of the applications I work on are found in TinyMe. But very few of them go to the TinyMe repos– most go to the PCLinuxOS repos. If you want, you can see what programs I package here:

http://www.mypclinuxos.com/doku.php/santalittlehelper:contribrecord:kdulcimer

Lately I've been trying to figure out what changed in AbiWord 2.6.4 that means it won't build whereas 2.6.3 built just fine. I also recently sent a package for Asio to Tex so hopefully we can rebuild the AbiWord AbiCollab plugin with better functionality. And I have several packages waiting in the queue to be built for the first time.

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Well, it's been a while since 2008.0 has been released, and overall I'm pretty happy with the results. We're sitting at #29 on Distrowatch and slowly rising. And yes, I do take a look at Distrowatch and take it semi-seriously. I take our placement as good encouragement. We've only had one stable release and we're up there with distros which have had many more releases.

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It's been in the back of my mind for quite a while to redo the TinyMe website. So what do you think? You can either leave a comment here or on the forums.

Meanwhile, TinyMe 2008.0 Final is going to be out soon. Very soon. Look for the announcement on DistroWatch soon.

It's been some time since my last post, so I thought I'd bring the community up to date on what's going on.

I haven't been as active lately on the MyPCLinuxOS and TinyMe sites because of technical issues. There is a problem with the student VLAN here at school and I cannot access MyPCLinuxOS or any of its subdomains (meaning the TinyMe site) via my computer. I have to use a computer in the lab to access MyPCLinuxOS. Meanwhile, I have been working away at getting TinyMe 2008.0 out the door.

There's a new application in the TinyMe repos which I would appreciate if you guys would test. Hit the reload button in Synaptic, then do a search for “lxappearance” and install that program.

Release of Final has also been hindered because of applications being updated upstream.

AbiWord has been updated from 2.5.1 to 2.6.2. I just sent that off to Tex so he can put it in the PCLinuxOS repos. AbiWord is a big job. It's taken me a couple of weeks to get AbiWord packaged. Tex hasn't put it in the PCLinuxOS repos yet, but you can enable TinyMe testing and get my build of AbiWord there. (Note: use of TinyMe testing may break your install. However, since at this point you're still using a test release, you might try it.)

The media player Audacious has been updated to 1.5.0. Unfortunately, due to the way the Audacious developers chose to build the MP3 plugin, it pulls in a 50MB dependency. To get around this, I tried to employ a unique packaging solution which doesn't seem to be working. Conky also needs updating but I have to build Audacious first.

Openbox has been updated to 3.4.7.1. Hopefully Gettinther can get to this soon.

LordUnR34l has taken over packaging of Transmission, our BitTorrent client, and so that will have been updated by Final.

A while back I added another very small application to the TinyMe repos called asunder. It's a CD ripper which can do CDDB lookups. Try it out! Asunder will probably be in TinyMe 2008.0

Well, I think that's all the updates I have for now. If you know of anything you thought I should have covered here, shoot me a PM on the forums.

The difference between Windows and Linux systems becomes very apparent to desktop users when it comes to how drives are managed. Windows automatically makes every drive accessible if it can. On the other hand, Linux assumes you want only what it takes to get the system running and makes you enable options if you want them. This information is stored in /etc/fstab. In /etc/fstab, you have to have each and every drive/partition listed if you want to access it. ¹⁾

While this method works well for an internal hard drive, what if you want to add a USB drive? With PCLinuxOS .93a and earlier, you had to have an entry in /etc/fstab for USB drives as well. This was a pain. Let's say I insert a USB drive in my computer. To Linux, this is (for the purposes of illustration) /dev/sda1. So with PCLinuxOS .93a, I had to tell it where to mount /dev/sda1. My usual place was to mount it in /mnt/kdulcimer. However, let's say my Dad plugs in his drive first. Linux sees it as /dev/sda1, so it mounts it in /mnt/kdulcimer. Hmm. Dad's drive, my mount point. Not good. Continuing with this scenario, after Dad's drive is plugged in and mounted, I plug in my drive. My drive is now /dev/sdb1. This just makes things horribly confusing. Now, I could just make /dev/sda1 mount to /mnt/sda1, but that's horribly indescriptive and it's annoying to constantly have to stop and trace which drive is connected to which mount point.

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