AmeLinux alpha1, for braveman only

Hello folks, today I'm proud to announce the AmeLinux alpha1, based on OpenSuse and built with Suse Studio. You can download the is from here, and please, rate it and share the link for your friends too.

What's inside?
Well, KDE 4.8 only, but you will be surprised to know the Linix kernel is of version 3.3, there are broadcom-wl drivers, ATI/AMD drivers are built and waiting for uploading... and distrobution uses Tumbleweed repos by default. There is default wallpaper and Androbit plasma theme preinstalled. Currently, in this alpha version I can not set 'em for live user, will fix it in some future version. You can select in KDE control panel, though.
If you want to give it a try, you can write it to USB stick using simple command (as root):

sudo dd if=AmeLinux.x86_64-0.0.10.iso of=/dev/sdX
where X is a letter of your USB stick.
The iso is installable too, and all you will get is fresh Tumbleweed OpenSuse, maintained by me and large OpenSuse community.

I maintain a Tumbleweed repo for some packages as well, and many more will be addeed soon. The repo is here.
Building Live CD with Suse Studio is extremely easy, but there are some catches when dealing with repository priorities. I implement a post-install script to fix that. The AmeOS repo is now with priority of 80, then is Kde 4.8 repo and so on.

Thats all, hope you will like it.
Please let me know about any bugs or suggestions and imrovements.

PS. Currently GNOME 3.2+ edition is baking.

Make your own local repo for Arch Linux

Every one Arch user has built a package from AUR at least once. It is very useful to have some (unofficial!) packages locally, instead of building them and throw the binary away after installing it. This is the way I'm doing with my Broadcom B4312 wireless drivers. I keep the binary package safe, so I am able to install it right away after reinstall my Arch system. Yes, I reinstall my system very often, because I tried some other ditro too - Ubuntu, Fedora, Opensuse etc.
Having all such packages, like drivers and/or some extra packages from AUR in one place is very useful.  Here is how.

VLC hits version 2.0

VLC  has more than 485 million downloads of VLC 1.1.x since now. Yesterday the development team presented the next major release - VLC 2.0.0 "Twoflower".
Twoflower has a new rendering pipeline for video, with higher quality subtitles, and new video filters to enhance your videos. There is also experimental supports for many new devices and BluRay Discs.

AmeOS pkgbuilds repo founded, GoboHide patch inside

AmeOS is the name of my own linux distro, based on ArchLinux, using Ubuntu development strategy - take a snapshot, make some patches, polish and publish. Simple, isn't it.

So, pkgbuilds repo for AmeOS is finally founded. It is located at https://github.com/ludmiloff/AmeOS, with core and utilities sections for now. Utilities is not really a pkgbuilds repo, but a source code for some handy utilities, which will be included into AmeOS.

The long way to AmeLinux

AmeLinux is my idea for Arch Linux based distro. AME is acronym for Arch Made Easy. In the begining this was only a project for MacOSX like Desktop environment - AnticoDeluxe (see here, here and my old blog). I can not continue coding for this project, but I will start a new rewrite very soon.

OpenSuse 12.1 and Tumbleweed vs ArchLinux, part 2

Here is the rest of my short comparison:

Feature	ArchLinux	openSuse
Package updates	Very often, about every day	Rare.Tumbleweed repo is updated more often,though.
Comunity support	Large and friendly	Very large
I want a customized iso?	You can build it yourself with Archiso. It is not so easy, but doable :) You will find it very powerful	Use Suse Studio It is a mater of some clicks and voila. Customization is very limited and Package Management is like a hell There is also kiwi (like archiso). I haven't tried yet.
ARM support	Yes, see ArchlinuxArm	Yes, but there are limited support with Kiwi builder and no support with Suse Studio

That's all. I think I will stick with ArchLinux for a while as it is more powerful and more customizeable. And I will try to create a separate repo, keeping packages for about a 3 or 6 monts for stability, and only applying patches, if needed at all. Just like Canonical made Ubuntu :)

OpenSuse 12.1 and Tumbleweed vs ArchLinux, part 1

Today I will compare side by side two of my favorite distros : ArchLinux (current) and openSuse 12.1. Both of them are fast and have quite recent software packages. There are many differences, though. Read them all

Feature	ArchLinux	openSuse
Linux Kernel	3.2.1	3.1 (3.2.1 available as update in Tumbleweed)
Boot speed (Compaq 610)	very fast, under 20s to KDM	comparable fast, about 20s
Package manager	Pacman there are several GUI haven't tested yet	zypper, rpm, there is YAST GUI, not so nice, though
Repositories	Central repos + AUR all in one place	Central repos + various OBS There is also a Packman repo, containing most closed source packages, also Tumbleweed and more. All in all, very bad design; There is web interface to OBS, which helps at some point;
If a package does not exists in repo?	You can create user package very easily and build it yourself via mapkepkg command	There is OBS, and as I said, with web interface, OBS has very often downtimes and failures, though. Despite this, OBS is great, you can build a package (like kernel)very quickly in the cloud saving your own machine
Configuration, Settngs utility	Mostly none, all is done by hand in various config files	YAST - for most of people (including my boss :) it is perfect configuration tool I dont like the way it looks, openSuse devs could make it better