Just noticed this new slackware-based distro on Distrowatch.com.

http://www.gnulinux.de/pocketlinux/i.../Main/HomePage

What's interesting is their choice of DE -- they call it KDE Light, and it's composed of KDE, but with Openbox as the WM and fbpanel instead of the kde kicker. They also go with the "1 app per task" model. I also noted that they apparently modified pkgtool:

"So we took a look at other installers and noticed the "shell script" based Slackware installer. The only thing we do not like about it is that it�s not i18n-able. So we took some time to customize the installer to be able to write back a complete tar archive on nearly any harddrive. We added i18n support (English and German right now. We are still looking for translators) and modified the kernel installation."

I hope they contribute the international support back to PV. I don't think I understand the modification "to be able to write back a complete tar archive on nearly any harddrive." ?

Anyway, plain ol' slackware works for me, but I always like to see slack-based distros.

Just installed it and looked at the package list, it is an extremely cut down version of Slackware, which I would guess is only suitable for a stand alone machine (preferably without an internet connection).

There are no networking or development packages.

There is no firewall but there are packages to connect to the internet (ppp, konqueror).

KDE lite is the thing that interested me (as I would like a version of KDE that is without all the added user programmes, these to be added as required, I only use three or four so the other few dozen are superfluous.), however KDE lite is perhaps stretching a point.

As far as I can see most of KDE is installed, but the programs are not run by KDE they are run with a combination of openbox and fbpanel (so not really KDE Lite at all, in fact not even KDE).

I could be wrong as I didn't spend any time exploring (no firewall), so this is only an opinion.

Samac

Interesting. Did you notice any changes to the installer or pkgtool like the internationalization support or the "write back a complete tar archive on nearly any harddrive" modification (whatever that is)?

I really didn't spend any time looking about, but hopefully the following will help.

The installer is very much simplified, once you have partitioned and formatted all it does is copy a pre-prepared set of files across, you then add a root password and that's your lot.

pkgtool looks the same, but I didn't try any options, and installpkg etc. are installed, and there is a package list in /var/log/packages.

As for the other things I didn't hang around long enough, no iptables package, so I didn't want to risk having the system running with an active broadband connection.

All those open ports make my blood run cold.

Samac

They probably mean "extract" when the speak of writing back a tar archive. The problem they are talking of is probably this:

Say, you create a tar archive from files on an USB stick with a FAT file system. The files you put into the archive have names that contain blanks or international special characters, like "böse" in German. Say, you do that on a machine that runs MS Windows.

Then you transfer the data to your Slackware box, by plugging and mounting the USB stick there. Trying to extract the tar archive you will most likely see a lot of error messages, due to different encoding and internationalisation and localisation settings. When you look at the extracted files, they are probably not complete, the file names and some files are corrupt.

Another example: Try to copy a file named This_is_a_file_with_a_very_long_name to a USB stick which is FAT formatted. The file name will be shortened to 8.3 and contain at least one tilde (~).

With better internationalization and localization these problems will vanish. Once this other, strangely wide-spread system, will join the party, that is.

gargamel

Hm, very interesting! Thanks for the explanation -- I had no clue what they were talking about!

I read the blurb on their website, it gives some good explanations: http://gnulinux.de/pocketlinux/