Arny has just announced the availability of new live DVD’s for Bluewhite64. There are now both KDE3 and KDE4 live DVD’s available and both sets have received a number of crucial security and stability updates.
Most exciting to me (and I hope a lot of users however) is the inclusion of bw64installer. For those who do not know yet, bw64installer is a complete, flexible, powerful and above all ease to use live system installer I wrote for bluewhite64. The code has been under development for some time (the official releases are shipping with version 0.0.5 which could be considered the first fully stable version).
This puts the LIVE versions of bluewhite64 completely on par with most other live distributions. Bluewhite64 has taken the interesting approach of buiding what is essentially a pure 64-bit port of slackware on one hand, and then being truly creative in their LIVE setups on the other, which ship a solid and easy to use preconfigured desktop system with a very impressive suite of applications, many of which are not included in the default (slackware ported) images, one example of which being the ALICE administration suite from the darklinux team.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, bw64installer is now part of the playground repository of DarkLinux which should allow it to grow even more. In the meantime, I have achieve my initial major goal with it- to make the creative and unique BW64 LIVE systems capable of acting as easy-to-use and desktop-friendly installable operating systems. This allows bluewhite64 a best-of-both worlds approach with full compatibility to slackware on one hand, and an easy preconfigured and modern desktop distribution on the other.
While merely writing an installer is not such a huge contribution, the fact is that nobody had done it – and writing a good installer for a distro isn’t easy. I had done it in the past and I could draw on my old experience (and some of my old code) which allowed me to write it faster than most people could with a solid set of features.
There are two new feature requests which I didn’t have time to finish before the release-freeze but they will be in the next update, along with any other sensible once I can come up with (a crucial thing about installers is that bloat is even more evil than usual – more steps means more difficulty and slower installs, so you have to be careful about which features you actually choose to include).
One side-note: please note that the current release does not support ReiserFS without some tweaking, so please install on ext3 partitions.
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