Other Help Topics :: DSL Editions



lucky13, I think you bring up a good point. It appears that once Robert gets John's blessing we will be ready to start doing some testing judging from some of his posts.

Robert, when you post the core for us to test, do you mind creating a thread in the extension area specifically for DSLCore extension development? We can use that as a discussion area on who is working on what.

Geez, it's been so long for me, I'm going to have to go back and review my old build notes!

Needless to say, I am excited to start working on this project as it is something that some of us have been talking to Robert about for probably 3yrs now.
I'm eager to get to try it too.

Pre-pre-reserving OSS4 sound support extension :)
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Since it's come up and without getting too far ahead of ourselves, maybe it's time to start staking out "turf" for core extensions so we have an idea of who wants to do what. That way we have more cooperation where possible, reduce overlap of effort, get on the same page about dependency extensions, etc.


I agree.  We need for the extensions to fit together in a coherent system and not have duplicate libraries overwriting each other or being redundant in the self contained apps.  My preference is to factor out things such as gtk2, graphics libraries (png,jpeg,tiff,etc.), SDL, SSL/SSH, and so on and so forth.  It makes for more extensions to load, but makes for a cleaner system.  Especially for those that install across the file system like the present .dsl.  Not as convenient as having every extension being self-sufficient, but makes it easier to keep extensions up to date and a smaller overall footprint of the installed extensions.  This would mean that the lower level libraries need to be ported or built first, and then the higher level apps later.  
The exception to factoring may be ones like gtk2.  We may want to keep gtk2 as standalone, not depending on a bunch of other extensions.  

I will be porting the extensions I have made for DSL 3x/4x to core once it is released.  May not be done overnight since as mentioned above there will be libraries that I will have to wait on such as the graphics libs.   Gtk 2.12.9 (and also Felson's 2.10.9) *should* work if they are converted to the newer extension format.  I will port gtk+-2.12.9, rebuilding or adding to if necessary, but I will not be offended if anyone makes the more recently released 2.12.10.  Or just improves upon 2.12.9.  But preferably give me a shout so there is no overlapping effort.
Juanito's smaller gtk2 extension would be good to have as well for the basic apps that do not require a full size gtk2.

I assume this is the direction we will want to go in as far as building extensions is concerned.  What do yall think?
I would have to say that this DSLCore is a great idea and what I was originally looking for when I started exploring Linux distros. I settled on DSL because of its lightweight and ability to NOT eat up compact flash drives using frugal installs. Though I ended up ripping out most of the applications that were in the base (i.e. word processing tools, fluxbox, games, browsers, etc.) since they were not needed for my application of DSL. But I also had to add a bunch of stuff like XFree, libc6, libstdc++6, gtk2, ttf fonts, and more. Having this tinycore would allow me to better support some of my hardware (usb touchscreens) while at the same time reducing the size of my system (since there is still many parts that I don't need that are included in the DSL base).

I look forward to this new DSLCore and thank you for all your hard work.  :)
Before anyone can get that far, I think we need a clear word on what to use for compiling.
Robert has said he used Finnix for bootstrapping. Haven't taken a look at that, but does it have a complete toolchain? Is it good for that use, or do we need a compiling extension specifically for the core?
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