I've been working on-and-off with another developer on a project based on VL. It was originally going to be VL-mini but for reasons that are irrelevant to this thread it's going to end up being a completely separate distro loosely based on VL -- as in some bits will come from Vector but others (including the kernel) will not. Just trimming down Vector to our specs was a huge job and building from scratch proved easier.
In any case, if VL were to meet our requirements we'd drop our project in half a heartbeat
I do like VL. Here's what we came up with so far for both green computing (Nano-ITX, Pico-ITX technology and Asus Eee PC) and older systems:
1. Choice of traditional install or hosted install (i.e.: vinstall or similar for machines which don't support or don't have a bootable CD-ROM drive or USB Boot support). A live CD (separate) is also necessary.
2. Footprint under 1.0GB. Fits on a 5cm (3") mini CD so iso must be <210MB. Dev tools not included but can be installed en masse from a metapackage in a repository. Ditto docs including man pages. Ditto i18n/i10n files.
3. Must run in 64MB of RAM with X. (OK if some heavier apps are available or even on the iso, but the core apps and UI must perform reasonably well with little memory.) A 32MB ultralight mode would be nice too but not critical. X support must be excellent for both older and newer hardware. It should be noted that this restriction doesn't apply to the live CD -- linux-live scripts really do need 96MB and I haven't found a decent alternative yet.
4. Live CD must support copy2ram and do it successfully in <= 512MB RAM. It'd be nice to include that in the traditional install as well. We haven't figured that bit out yet.
5. Our (still not public) alpha has two window managers: jwm and pekwm. We've played with fluxbox but found it a little slow on 64MB systems. The ones we chose are happy in 32MB. We added fbpanel to pekwm to add a reasonable panel and use Esetroot to add a background image. Other window managers that performed acceptably included aewm++, windowmaker, fvwm2, ion, and afterstep. Ion was rejected due to licensing concerns. Using dfm to add icons to the desktop was considered and then ditched. Many old systems or systems with tiny screens run at relatively low resolution. Clutter is NOT a good thing.
6. Apps in our alpha include abiword and gnumeric. They run acceptably well in 32MB so we ditched SIAG Office but it is a reasonable alternative. File managers that work well enough include emelfm and xfe.
7. Our chosen terminal is mrxvt -- tabbed but lightweight enough. rxvt-unicode is another good choice. aterm works well enough too.
8. Believe it or not GIMP is usable (OK, just barely) at 64MB. xv is the lightweight (but limited) alternative.
9. Firefox is NOT usable at 64MB of RAM. Opera is. We wanted all Open Source but reality forced us in a different direction. Opera is also smaller than Firefox. Dillo is the lightweight alternative.
10. Don't even think about Flash, Java, or other fancy shmancy plugins. Optional and in the repository - yes. On the iso -- no chance.
11. Have some decent multimedia options for machines with more RAM. Mplayer and either xmms or bmp are good, basic choices.
12. CD burning -- grafburn seems like the best choice at present. I hate using anything from Puppy Linux because of their community but there you have it.
13. Most reasonable text editors are light enough. Bluefish is fine in 32MB of RAM for HTML/PHP. Leafpad runs on anything.
14. Ya gotta have vi and/or nano. AliXe went with just mcedit for a command line editor and I hate it.
15. Asus Eee PC is a special animal all it's own and probably is a separate release.
These are just random thoughts, really, but you get the idea...
-C
Poll
