Great news for some, maybe. I have begun work on constructing a fully featured Live distribution based on Arch Linux, which would contain tools and resources for graphic designers, photographers, DTP technicians, and web designers.
UPDATE: I fotgot to mention. There is currently not definite release date, but I'm thinking about a month from now. The docs should take the most time, but I want to take my time and make them not only informative but actually useful. Also, I'm reading through tons of legal stuff (mostly licenses) to weed out anything that would prevent people from duplicating and sharing the DVD with others (Adobe Reader is already off the disc). I'll probably release parts of the docs upfront so people can comment. I will also release the package list as part of the documentation, so you can all see what will be on the DVD.
The current target is a 1.5 GB Live DVD for i686 architectures. I have so far created one test DVD and it works very well. Big thanks to gradgrind from the Arch Linux community for his excellent Larch script.
The current status is:
- DVD boots
- it supports ATI cards, but not out-of-the-box with OpenGL accel.
- it has no support for nVidia
- it has problems booting straight to KDE (it is trivial to fix this, though)
- it contains almost all commonly requested tools.
- I have started working on documentation which will be *complete* and included on the DVD
The current version is 0.0.3-beta3, but I had to postpone its release because I have to remove some packages with problematic licenses. I'm also planning to create a non-free-don't-share version of the DVD with packages such as Adobe Reader or Flash plugin, but I might change my mind.
If you're interested in helping with this, I'm currently mostly accepting ideas, and will also appreciate 3rd party testing once the .iso is uploaded.
There are also some items that could be useful in future releases that I have no skills to create:
1. scripts to automate detecting and loading proprietary drivers for ATI and nVidia cards
2. scripts to enhance network connectivity
3. contributed docs from photographers and 3D artists (after initial documentation is finished)
Please send me comments and suggestions (use the contact link in the left side-bar). Further announcements related to ArStudio will be made here until I create its own web page.
If I forget to post here, I'm usually hanging out at the #scribus channel (irc.freenode.net), so you can find me there. And there is always the contact form on this website.
