Tuesday 16 February 2010

The Future's Bright - The Future's Orange!


Over the last few weeks Bill Cox has made significant progress on fixing the problems caused by PulseAudio in Ubuntu. Some of these fixes have actually been ported back into the development of Ubuntu and at the moment it looks like this will provide a very responsive and stable accessibility experience. Although it is not quite as snappy as Orca with Alsa on Debian, it is very close and Ubuntu of course offers much better hardware compatibility. Coupled with the fact that Remastersys doesn't yet support Squeeze and it is very likely that the final release of Squeeze may be delayed even further, it looks like we will initially be going with an Ubuntu-only version for Vinux 3.0! This will also provide a simpler installation process, a USB installer and WUBI support. I have spent the last few days working out how to built up the iso from scratch starting with the mini.iso, so that it contains all of the necessary files but still fits on a CD. If there are no nasty surprises ahead then this will become the first LTS version of Vinux with three years support and updates. Bill has also created a Vinux repository so we will be able to provide patches, updates and Vinux specific packages through synaptic and/or apt-get. There will also hopefully be a DVD sized 'Leviathan' edition which will contain lots of extra packages, but it may not be possible to provide a pure CLI version as the Ubuntu version of Remastersys requires a GUI to work. The main release will however come with speakup and a basic range of CLI applications pre-installed. So I would like to thank Bill for all of the hard work he has done, as well as everyone else who has contributed to the development process by submitting fixes, suggestions and/or feedback.