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Derick Eisenhardt
Mar 11, 2007, 12:01:58 AM3/11/07
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Hey guys.... figured I'd finally give our mailing list a try ;)
Okay, we seriously have to start working on the OS right now if we're gonna have any hope of staying within the current roadmap's timeline. I'll be honest...I've got fairly limited knowledge to all the details that make up a Linux distro. I've been meaning to piece together a Linux From Scratch install to learn, but have still yet to find the time/motivation. I only have real experience with 3 distros: Slackware, Gentoo and Ubuntu, and well I guess a little bit of Arch too. There are thousands of choices out there for us to build on top of, if we deem that the best solution, and I'm thinking it probably is. My thinking is that if we're going to be selling this concept to businesses, they'll probably sleep much better at night if we use one of the top 20 distros as our base. There are sites like DistroWatch to find this kind of data...but it's accuracy is questionable being that it's simply based off page hits to their site from what I understand. I think it's pretty obvious that in the desktop world Ubuntu, Fedora and SUSE are the major players, but since we're not really building a desktop distro even though it's graphical it's not as huge a deal.
I think our options will really be based off the package manager these distros are built on top of. As far as I see it we have 4 viable choices: DPKG/Apt, RPM/Yum?, Pacman(Arch), and SmartPM. We need a PM that will handle binary packages with both ease and grace. Our users will need to be able to download/install games and such with a single button press and work perfectly 99.999% of the time. The PM must be able to automagically take care of updates with zero user interaction nor errors. The PM must be able to handle the fact that there will be no shared libraries installed, and there will be multiple games installed that have their own version of those libraries that only they will use. They have to be super fast and bandwidth efficient, as well as extensible. I'd like to give users the option to use bitTorrent, or something like it, to speed up the download of free games/demos/system-updates/etc, and we will probably need the ability to add some sort of DRM scheme to the purchased games and media. We also will need the ability for users to cache their downloaded games in the case their hard drive is not large enough to hold all the (digitally distributed) games they own at once.
Thoughts?
-Derick
PS. I also already posted a message on the board with some similar thoughts ;)
Okay, we seriously have to start working on the OS right now if we're gonna have any hope of staying within the current roadmap's timeline. I'll be honest...I've got fairly limited knowledge to all the details that make up a Linux distro. I've been meaning to piece together a Linux From Scratch install to learn, but have still yet to find the time/motivation. I only have real experience with 3 distros: Slackware, Gentoo and Ubuntu, and well I guess a little bit of Arch too. There are thousands of choices out there for us to build on top of, if we deem that the best solution, and I'm thinking it probably is. My thinking is that if we're going to be selling this concept to businesses, they'll probably sleep much better at night if we use one of the top 20 distros as our base. There are sites like DistroWatch to find this kind of data...but it's accuracy is questionable being that it's simply based off page hits to their site from what I understand. I think it's pretty obvious that in the desktop world Ubuntu, Fedora and SUSE are the major players, but since we're not really building a desktop distro even though it's graphical it's not as huge a deal.
I think our options will really be based off the package manager these distros are built on top of. As far as I see it we have 4 viable choices: DPKG/Apt, RPM/Yum?, Pacman(Arch), and SmartPM. We need a PM that will handle binary packages with both ease and grace. Our users will need to be able to download/install games and such with a single button press and work perfectly 99.999% of the time. The PM must be able to automagically take care of updates with zero user interaction nor errors. The PM must be able to handle the fact that there will be no shared libraries installed, and there will be multiple games installed that have their own version of those libraries that only they will use. They have to be super fast and bandwidth efficient, as well as extensible. I'd like to give users the option to use bitTorrent, or something like it, to speed up the download of free games/demos/system-updates/etc, and we will probably need the ability to add some sort of DRM scheme to the purchased games and media. We also will need the ability for users to cache their downloaded games in the case their hard drive is not large enough to hold all the (digitally distributed) games they own at once.
Thoughts?
-Derick
PS. I also already posted a message on the board with some similar thoughts ;)
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