Brinjals and Dragons

I announce “Magik”, a GNU/Linux operating system based on Arch Linux. What is Arch Linux? Arch Linux is an i686 optimised community driven, rolling-release based linux distribution that is flexible and lightweight, and tries to “Keep It Simple”. From their wiki :

“Arch provides a minimal environment upon installation, (no GUI), already compiled and optimized for i686/x86-64 architectures. Arch is lightweight, flexible and simple. Its design philosophy and implementation make it easy to extend and mold into whatever kind of system you’re building- from a minimalist console machine to the most grandiose and feature rich desktop environments available. Rather than tearing out unneeded and unwanted packages, Arch offers the power user the ability to build up from a minimal foundation without any defaults chosen for them. It is the user who decides what Arch Linux will be.”

You can find more here :
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Linux

Why Arch Linux? Why not Ubuntu or Debian? I have always liked Debian based systems and I have been a big fan of apt-get. Having a system based on Ubuntu brings many advantages - vendors releasing compatible packages, a large amount of existing documentation and howtos, an enormous user community, the immensely huge repositories and all the little tweaks and polish that goes into Ubuntu. But what if Magik is not destined to be a superset of Ubuntu? Would all those advantages still apply just as much? I want to build Magik from the ground up, rather than make it from breaking something else. Arch Linux offers me just that; the ability to build something from a minimal foundation without any defaults chosen. What is unique about Arch Linux though is its amazing package manager, called “pacman”. It combines a simple binary package format with an easy-to-use build system called ABS which is a ports-like system for building software from source. Building from source? But who am I targeting? Magik will target the basic desktop user. One of its goals is to pass the WaG (Wife and Girlfriend) test. ABS simplifies building packages from source and thus brings bleeding-edge to the masses. The concept of user repositories (Arch User Repositories) only expands the already huge software repositories of Arch. Finally, and most importantly, I love Arch and that is the biggest reason why Magik will be based on it.

Why another linux distribution? How is Magik different? I had heard a lot about openSuse’s YaST and when I finally used it in openSuse 11.0, I was thoroughly disappointed, not because I cannot complete tasks with it but because itis confusing to the basic desktop user, in contrast to the Mandriva Linux Control Center which may not do as much but what it does, it presents clearly and in a manner that allows the basic desktop user to use it without much apprehension. Mandriva however lacks the polish of openSuse; the branding, the artwork and the visual appeal. Not long later, the intro video of Pardus Linux blew me away. All these different ingredients from different worlds I thought would make an amazing recipe together. Magik will take the best elements (which I understand is a subjective matter) from various works and put them together ; but that still doesn’t make Magik different or unique.

Presenting “The Wand”. Without taking anything away from the command line, little graphical user interfaces often make the difference between
- the basic desktop user being able to use the awesome power of CLI tools
- and deciding that Linux is not for them.

Distribution vendors try to tackle this problem by writing their own front-ends using either Gtk or Qt and often both, that requires them to maintain two sets of programs. “The Wand” is a custom implementation of the Mylin framework that is geared towards building web-interface based wizards and front-ends. The advantage of using the web-interface is two-fold; one that it can be cross-toolkit compatible and second that it can seamlessly work over the network. The Qt port of Gecko is coming along nicely, and Prism-like minimal instances of Gecko (or Webkit) can be used to display the applications. Gecko/Webkit also means there will be support for SVG, Canvas and CSS3. While not necessary, it could be extended to use Flash as well. Consistency is a good thing but often it limits our interfaces. There is no holy-grail of interfaces that can do it all and each task may have a different interface that can be most effective for what is being done. Moving away from traditional toolkit interfaces can remove the mental block and push us to create unique interfaces that are more usable for the tasks we want to achieve. Magick will use “The Wand” to create wizards and tools to cover the most common tasks. It will have a repository, very much like the Firefox Add-ons portal to expand its functionality and install new applications that may be standalone or front-ends to different CLI tools. This will make Magik unique. Well then, let there be magik.