Vinux community update

[Rob Whyte]

On behalf of the Vinux team I would like to provide the below Vinux
community update.
The recently released Vinux 5.1 images on the 12th of January have been
popular and the download statistics show over 2,800 recorded downloads
through Sourceforge, with our Torrents also happily seeding. As you
know, this was not a major release, so I think the stats show Vinux
still has a strong following. We also chose to release 4.1 images, which
we had not had much development movement on since spinning the proposed
release. These images have also had close to 900 downloads, which I feel
is pretty good considering there were no release announcements.

Our Vinux funds sit just on $2,334 U.S dollars. This is generated
primarily by kind donations and previous fund-raising efforts. It is
still our hope to become a non profit, and maybe it should be my
new years resolution to make that happen.

Vinux 6.0 is in the works based upon Ubuntu Xenial 16.04. We have an
alpha image uploaded, but though it boots to the desktop, it is not yet
installable. We are confident that this can easily be addressed once we
finish uploading the Vinux seeds to our PPA and do any fine tuning that
may need to take place.

Vinux long ago decided to move from Debian to Ubuntu, as the hardware
support was better and the accessibility was further polished. However,
recent releases of Ubuntu have made it harder for Vinux to do what we
hoped without major development, and taken us further away from our
ability to keep up with the latest accessibility framework. Our Vinux 4
releases were classic examples of that; we had a great release, but were
held back with Orca and the accessibility framework, unless we back
ported half of Gnome.

We have with great deliberation decided to move away from Ubuntu and to
a Fedora base. We welcome community input and are happy to answer any
questions that may arise. Though with any base change to a distribution
there is a learning curve, we are confident after going through the
change, users will feel happy with the simplicity of the installers and
new features and flexibility the change will bring to Vinux.

Basing on Fedora will allow us to be much closer to upstream
accessibility technologies and frameworks, and should mean less work
when it comes to package maintenance. In addition, Fedora tracks
upstream very closely, to the point where for the most part, they will
not carry patches to packages unless they are already upstream. As such,
they trust upstream projects more, and thus if a bug is found, more
often than not it exists in the upstream project.

Fedora also have good tooling when it comes to producing iso images. It
will be very easy for the Vinux project to have an iso image per desktop
environment, for example one for GNOME, one for MATE, and a console only
version, since Fedora does have a console installer.

it will also be easier to be able to get involved with development
should you wish to do so. Fedora maintain all their packaging on git,
and we are likely going to be able to use that as a base for any
packages we want to update or change. As such, we should be able to use
github as the place for all development work, allowing for people to
submit changes if they so wish, and allowing people who have a good
contribution record who know what they are doing to easily be added to
the development on a per package or project basis. Github has a wiki and
issue tracking system, so developer documentation and how to do things
can be documented there, and for any packages we carry, we can track our
bugs there as well.

We have not yet worked out the support lifetime, but it will probably be
based on how long the Fedora project supports the release we base our
releases on.

The Vinux team have for some time been chatting with the Sonar and newly
founded accessibility development team about moving forward and
collaborating on a new project together. We are happy to be able to
speak to this as it evolves, and look forward to our teams and others
being welcome in the future.

Warm regards
Rob Whyte

[kendell clark]

hi

I want to get this out there that though I develop an accessibile
distribution of my own with help, if you guys move to fedora they are
great people and really care about accessibility. I probably would've
switched over to them had I not found and decided to help sonar.

Thanks

Kendell Clark

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