lesslinux.org Development Blog

I am proud to announce a relatively stable and relatively complete development build of LessLinux Search and Rescue. It is built upon my latest efforts to emancipate from the Computer BILD flavoured “classical” desktop, moving to a sleeker desktop, using Cairo Dock and Openbox as desktop environment. The last twelve months have seen some fresh commercial builds, probably around more than 1.5 million copies included in cover mount CDs sold on various European computer magazines. So it is really time for more open source builds now.

Fresh software

This build is based upon Linux kernel 3.3.1 Glibc 2.14.1, XFCE 4.8, OpenBox 3.5.0 and Cairo Dock 2.4. The desktop now is a mixture of XFCE components, Cairo Dock as Panel on the bottom and Openbox as Windows manager. This results in a look clearly different from earlier open source builds. Take a look:

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I recently assembled the build script to compile a completely free and open version of the Rescue System that started life as “Computerbild Notfall-CD 2.0”. The free version is dubbed “LessLinux Search and Rescue” and can be easily modified to build your own derivates. In the next three days I will guide you through the whole build process (kind of real time).

Currently the only supported build environment is VMware, this means you must have either VMware Workstation, VMware Player (Win, Linux) or VMware Fusion (Mac OS X) installed. Player is sufficient, since the build environments are considered as some kind of “disposable environment”. Note that the VMware image expands to up to 80GB, to prevent fragmentation and reach best performance you might want to put it on a separate partition. (more…)