[Voyage-linux] Update on Voyage 0.2 development

[Punky Tse]

Dear voyage users,

After releasing 0.1 on mid-Feb, I started to think about how 0.2 be
shaped.  One and a half month has passed, some ideas and suggestions
has been gathered and processed.  Because voyage linux is a part-time
work and I also have a part-time studies with a "reasonable" workload,
the first 0.2 preview release will not be available until early May. 
Anyway, lets see below some plans and unreleased work I prepared for
0.2.

1. Kernel update.  I am very frustrating about user kept asking to add
features and drivers to the kernel.  But on the other hand, I am happy
with that as people are using it.  My approach is to include every
drivers requested, as long as it is not too hard to integrate to
kernel.  So don't be surprise if it ends up with a mega kernel.  But I
should re-iterate that the kernel driver source must be built-in or
provided as kernel patch.  Besides, personally I am stuggling to drop
2.6.8 and go for 2.6.10/11.  But it's all depends on debian kernel
team to provide a reliable and stable kernel.  For impatient, please
look at http://www.voyage.hk/dists/unstable/kernel/.  I will
occasionally post the updated kernel there to fullfil someone's need
without notifying the list.

2. Voyage installation CD - these days I has been testing the bootable
CD approaches and I found knoppix provides a very good base for the
job.  I already built a workable knoppix + voyage iso image.  It boots
well in VMWare, and I just don't have time and extra machine to test
it out.  The iso image is about 50MB.  It includes initrd from
knoppix, the root image of sarge from debootstrap and a voyage-0.1
distro.

3. Installation.  This is always the problematic one.  dd image might
be an option, but I suspect that this approach will limit the
partition to a fixed size, say 64 or 128 MB, that is not flexible for
other flash drives with different capacity (correct me if I am wrong).
 When a install CD is in place, I can either run pxeboot off the CD or
run the installation script for copying to disk/flash device. 
Besides, there is another plan to move the configuration part (passwd,
machine profile selection and the new network config) to init.d
scripts.  These configuration scripts will be run when voyage is first
booted.

4. Promote to wider attention.  This is where I want voyage to be.  At
this moment, there are not a lot of interest of using voyage linux,
especially for production use.  The reason is that there are too many
alternatives providing the same functionalities already.  Based on
some private conversations I have made with others, there is a Greece
wireless community using it and a commercial company is interested on
kernel side.  In order to promote it a wider attention, the first
thing is to let your surrounding people knowing this project and to
have them using it.  The second thing is having more people joining
the community, especially some contributors to give idea and some
volunteers to enhance it.  That's why I said before voyage needs a
better infrastructure to allow users further customize voyage for
their own use.

Sorry to have such long paragraph.  This is not I intented to do, but
I can't stop my mind doing so. ;-)  Let's move on and build a better
community for voyage.

-- 
Regards,
Punky
P U N K N ! X  . c o m
Technology + Lifestyle
(http://www.punknix.com) 

Voyage Linux
(http://www.voyage.hk/software/voyage.html)