Hi all, just wanted to notify you that i have finally come around to release and upload Window Maker Live 2013-03-06 to sourceforge. It is already available for download and further testing from your side from here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/wmlive/files/wmlive_2013-03-06 It took me quite a while to get this out and, in hindsight, the amount of changes appear to have have accumulated to quite a few. If i am not mistaken, i must have build the ISO images a few hundreds of times. An almost equal amount of test installations was performed both in KVM and VirtualBox, as well as on a Thinkpad T60. There have been lots of changes, and while Window Maker Live looks more or less the same at first sight, the biggest amount of modifications and enhancements have been done under the hood. Of major importance was a hassle free installation process with the least user interaction requirement possible, and i think this has been accomplished. Also, it was very important to create a well working build process for the ISO images, as i would like to enable others to produce their own ISO compilations of Window Maker Live. While this works fine for me, it still needs to be tested and verified from others. The build tree sources are included with each ISO image, but are also available as a separate archive at sourceforge. I have more or less reached my limits for the testing and need more people to have a closer look and provide some useful feedback. Please download and try it out. Any feedback is very welcome! Please find attached the README file which can also be downloaded from sourceforge.net. Best regards, Paul Seelig <wml...@users.sf.net> http://wmlive.sourceforge.net
### wmlive (2013-03-06) Based on Window Maker 0.95.4 Window Maker Live (wmlive) is an installable live CD/ISO, based mostly on the "wheezy" branch of Debian Linux. Its main purpose is to serve as a show case for the Window Maker window manager, which serves as the default graphical user interface, and therefore has received special preconfiguration care. If you are already running an installation based on a former version, then don't bother downloading this here, unless you really need a more up to date installation ISO. While most of the accumulated fixes and enhancements are well worth this release, the only real changes affect the Window Maker version and some very worthwhile installation fixes. CD sized ISO images for both 32bit (i486/i686) and 64bit (amd64) are available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/wmlive/files from the 'wmlive_2013-03-06' folder for download. What are the most remarkable changes for this release? # Desktop related changes: * Based on the latest Window Maker 0.95.4 release packages as provided for Debian by packaging wizard Rodolfo "kix" Garcia, but in a slightly modified and recompiled version for this particular wmlive release. * Firefox and Thunderbird have been updated to their latest release version 19.0 and 17.0.3, repectively. * In order to make room for some generally more useful components, the office applications abiword and gnumeric, and also davmail were removed. The vlc media player was substituted by smplayer2/mplayer2. * The installation to disk is now performed separately from the live desktop session, due to current preseeding restrictions of the debian installer. Great care was taken to limit the installation process to the least necessary questions, so that it basically only asks for location, keyboard, user name for the principal account, the partition layout, and whether the system should be encrypted. No further user interaction is required for installation completion. # Under the hood: * This release is almost completely based on the current state of the "wheezy" branch of Debian, with selected components coming from both the 'unstable' and 'experimental' branches, and other sources too. * The 32bit ISO version by default uses a i486 based kernel flavour for installation, but a PAE enabled i586 kernel is included in parallel. This enables booting and installation on hopefully most Intel based machines, while at the same time offering optional support for modern multicore processors once the system ist installed to disk. * The 64bit ISO version uses an amd64 kernel version 3.2 for the principal installation. Once the installation to disk has completed, optionally the 3.8 kernel from the experimental Debian branch is included. * The current wheezy debian-installer release candiate suffers from a few known issues, which we had to work around. The built in GRUB bootloader installation routine is still broken, and therefore has been disabled and was replaced by a post install script which is automatically performed at the end of the installation. Unlike in former wmlive releases, no user interaction is required anymore. * The ISO image contains an archive with the complete tree of the build scripts used to create this very image in the top level 'extras' directory. It contains (almost) everything you need to recreate a customized version of the wmlive ISO, apart from the availability of any Debian mirror to download the required additional deb files. These build scripts will also be copied to /usr/local/src/wmlive during the final stages of the installation to disk. # Known issues: * We still do need a GTK3 theme resembling the WINGs widget set in order to visually integrate GTK3 based applications with Window Maker. Please contact me if you work on or know about such a project. There have been many more changes and enhancements, but which are far too numerous and small to merit any special mention of each. For more detailed changes information, please consult the ChangeLog.txt file, which is also available separately in the Window Maker Live download area on Sourceforge. In fact, i wouldn't mind if more people would get involved with the maintenance and further enhancement of wmlive. Please contact me if you are interested to move this project further along and beyond its currrent limitations. Enjoy installing and using Window Maker Live! Best regards, Paul Seelig -- Paul Seelig <wml...@users.sf.net> http://wmlive.sourceforge.net
