"Xonotic OS"

Disclaimer: i'm not planning on doing anything. i simply lack the resources.


Some of you may remember how i was working on a Nexuiz OS, when development of Freespire (the system i worked with) was discontinued. Later, my notebook monitor got damaged, health problems, financial problems, blah blah, simply put: things got in my way. It was supposed to be a LiveCD that would boot either directly to the game or to the system designed for gamers and developers. The software would include multimedia codecs, graphics and audio editing, GtkRadiant and Blender for 3D. i had also ported Sev's Wicked 2 Black menu theme to deKorator and that's what this post is about; merchandise! XD
No, seriously, i mean to promote Xonotic. Somebody could create a GTK theme, for example. (or a theme for Plasma, Aurorae, mouse pointer, Compiz, ett-sett-terra!....)

P.S.: Things have gotten easier, with things like the openSUSE Build Service, for example, and Sabayon, which is a fine OS. i'm just saying.

I strongly suggest remixing Ubuntu for that - with the number of the remixes out there, I think it's really easy to create your own one. This would only leave removing useless stuff, like ubuntu one, openoffice, brasero, etc., doing a gtk theme and a plymouth theme, then including a source-based "xonotic manager", which would in essence be a collection of graphical front-ends to compiling various components of Xonotic toolchain. I'd try this... Unfortunately, my motherboard got cat'd (yeah, cat'd, as in, a cat, of the feline family, broke it) so I can't access graphical options higher than Compiz-level. I may still want to think about it.

This would actually be a great way of having a Xonotic CD - take your Xonotic anywhere, on any PC! There is one problem, though - changes don't get saved... Unless we do it as a usb drive distro. I imagine that the graphical front-end to the first-run config should also generate a config file using the username as player's name...

Still, the core should be an installable linux-based system with xonotic, git, netradiant, blender and usual multimedia stuff.

Yay! This sounds interesting. It might be difficult to make this really work cool, but could be a nice option for LAN parties. Everybody gets a USB stick with Xonotic OS, they boot, they play

All system resources for the game = maximum performace

If you think about making it also a developer's choice - please add some more software. Here are my suggestions (including your previous suggestions):

For graphics:

• Inkscape (vector)
  
• GIMP (raster)
  
• Blender (3D)
  

For sound:

• Ardour (versatile DAW)
  
• LMMS (music production)
  
• Audacity (sound editor)
  
• Ubuntu Studio's audio plugins pack (DSP effects)
  

That is a base of what I use in ma all creative workz.

Any more suggestions?

we could call it xonos

@Minkovsky Why not just avoid all of that cruft and use Debian?

Everybody gets a USB stick with Xonotic OS, they bott, they play

Hehe, that sounds awesome

IMO the main problem here is graphics. Free graphics on Linux really blow (if you're not using Nouveau, that is), and the question is: Will xonos take the proprietary graphics route (and not be GPL) or the free graphics route (and be GPL)?

In the mean time, I guess we can all decorate our WMs and applications for Xonotic

XonOS? +1

It can be GPL and have manufacturer's drivers - just give the user a choice between having a free system or better graphics, in the first-run config.

Now, forking Debian and not Ubuntu may be a good idea. The plan would be to strip Debian of more or less everything (only core GNOME would remain), and then add:
System utilities
A task manager,
Jockey,
Install to HDD,
(optional)Manufacturer's graphics settings tool,
Archive manager,
Synaptic,
Xonotic Update Utility (a program or set of scripts which will help to update and compile Xonotic and other non-package tools),
Sound Mixer,
Various customization tools
Graphics
Inkscape
Blender 2.5 (maintained by XUU)
Gimp
Sound
Audacity
Ardour 3 (maintained by XUU; optional)
LMMS (maintained by XUU; optional)
Effects (various; maintained by XUU; optional - default when installing either Ardour or LMMS)
For development
Emacs-based tool with mode files for QC (optional)
QC compiler (shipped with Xonotic)
Games
Xonotic (maintained by XUU)
Generic office games (optional)

GUI=gnome/gtk;WM=compiz+emerald or mutter

Did I miss anything?

As for XUU, this would be the installer/first-run configurer/XonoSuite manager, which would: Configure the usb stick after first run, act as to-HDD installer, maintain various elements of Xonotic toolchain that aren't in any package repository (source-based).

I guess that isnt a bad idea
Additional, adding some very normal programs wouldnt be bad - probably for those who dont want to reboot or whatever...

I sometimes remember some guys around here saying "it would be great if xonotic has cd-images to be sold in usual shops". This would be a possibility for a thing alike selling a great, free OS and our game. The money can be donated to server admins, devs or for promotion.

So, Idk. Go on with some nice ideas

My choice would be Sabayon, for various reasons: it offers both source-based and binary package management, there is a minimal core install (CoreCDX, SpinBase) and Molecule, which is perfect for building our own "spin". Then there's stuff like Kernel-Switcher and other goodies. Plus: it offered booting into Nexuiz on earlier LiveCD's.

Just use Ubuntu One or some other distributed storage syncing the tmpfs at /home/xonotic-user/ and you'll have your work saved.

...
Emacs-based tool with mode files for QC (optional)
...
GUI=gnome/gtk;WM=compiz+emerald or mutter

Prepare for the holy war

All jokes aside, I do quite like Gnome but I haven't used it in a while (I haven't even touched Gnome shell yet, more out of a lack of time to properly test it than anything). Could it be worth investigating some lighter alternatives like Enlightenment or Openbox?

As for XUU, this would be the installer/first-run configurer/XonoSuite manager, which would: Configure the usb stick after first run, act as to-HDD installer, maintain various elements of Xonotic toolchain that aren't in any package repository (source-based).

It may be easier to maintain a Debian package repository that the package manager automatically syncs with, or have an overlay (if Sabayon is used) and a bunch of ebuilds that update all of the bleeding edge software. IMO it's easier to release "stable" binary builds on an upstream repo and have the same user experience everywhere rather than compiling from Git by default. Obviously, the main xonotic.git repo (at least) would be included, but this is only for people who REALLY want it.

IMO it would be nice to leave as much as possible to the operating system and existing software, rather than having to write new code that won't be used anywhere else. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but maintaining piles of software is difficult.

...booting into Nexuiz...

^This^

That would be an awesome bootloader option ("Boot to XonOS" or "Get straight into the game!")

Hold on, did I really say Emacs-based? Well, just a good text editor with indentation and highlighting. Be it not vim, though, as many find it confusing as hell.

My choice for Gnome was because it's faster than KDE, which is a joke when running from a usb stick or a live cd. I was thinking, though, maybe Fluxbox would be a good idea?

Hold on, did I really say Emacs-based? Well, just a good text editor with indentation and highlighting. Be it not vim, though, as many find it confusing as hell.

My choice for Gnome was because it's faster than KDE, which is a joke when running from a usb stick or a live cd. I was thinking, though, maybe Fluxbox would be a good idea?

Even more minimalist would be better, Flux is still bloated compare to say DWM or TinyWM. LXDE might be a wise choice. It's running in milliseconds. Speed is most important here. I'd be glad to work on building it. One thing to note is that we cannot release a "open source" version if you want to support nVidia at all. The novouea driver is great, but 3% of the performance of the official nVidia driver. This came from personal testing. I don't know about the ATI drivers.

One thing to note is that we cannot release a "open source" version if you want to support nVidia at all. The novouea driver is great, but 3% of the performance of the official nVidia driver. This came from personal testing. I don't know about the ATI drivers.

Performance will be very important for this... and I don't think we'll be able to rely on true open source drivers for that... Maybe one day, but this day is yet to come.
[troll]Ati+Linux=Sucks[/troll]
More seriously, for what is of Ati drivers, they were quite a mess back when I had my HD4850 (compared to NVidia ones of course...), I looked a bit at the Radeon HD driver, which was coming up well for older cards (understand HD1xxx-HD3xxx) but support was coming very slowly for HD4xxx.

I think LXDE might be a good choice too. Lite and fast, that's what the GUI of such a CD should be and that's what LXDE is.
For what is of the core OS, no idea. I would personally say Debian or Ubuntu, but that's mostly because I am apt-addict.

In any situation, it would be great to have a CD image with autorun/"installer" for windows users... Share it in lan parties and people can get the game fast.
When I'm talking about an installer, I'm talking about a utility which would copy the files from the CD/DVD to the hard drive to get better speed. (the game would actually be playable from CD, no compression or whatever)

Why stop at distro when you can make it run on hardware? Just imagine. You turn on the PC, see the GRUB listing:
Gentoo Linux
Windows 7
Xonotic

You select the third option and the game is running in a couple of seconds. Of course we'll need to implement some memory manager, network, audio and video drivers but it's totally worth it!

But I hit ^W without posting it.

Srsly:

DE is an important decision but why can't you just include all of vim, emacs, nano, kate and gedit e.g.?

[troll]Ati+Linux=Sucks[/troll]

s/troll/awkward-truth/g. I WOULD buy a fancy high-end low-power ATI card, but I don't see a point in decent hardware if manufacturers are unwilling to release free software drivers or at least half decent Linux support. As a result, my current box uses integrated graphics XD

As far as editors go, IMO we should have Nano, Vim, and Gedit. POSSIBLY Emacs (it shouldn't really push distro size up, but if it does it should be left out). Either way this is a minor point

You select the third option and the game is running in a couple of seconds. Of course we'll need to implement some memory manager, network, audio and video drivers but it's totally worth it!

We could more or less do this if we took Linux and added a REALLY light userspace (I mean, sdl on directfb+busybox). This way we're a distro in our own right

I'd be into replacing Gnome with OpenBox - it's much lighter on the resources. Yet, we'd need a short thingie that would describe how to use it (how to lanuch applications and shee...).

A good example of OpenBox-based distro is http://crunchbanglinux.org/

I'm using KDE for it's features and look, but it kicks the shit out of my laptop Needing 1GB of RAM to start. CrunchBang loads about 160 MB into RAM.

clanclanclan: you mean... Linux From Scratch? That would be awesome for performance (in theory), but insane to maintain. Or did you mean taking an already-known distro base, with everything removed but what's needed for Xonotic + a very minimal GUI?

@unfa: Openbox still takes way more resources than LXDE. LXDE has a standard layout GUI unlike OpenBox. Just a thought.

@Taximus: We can build the distro off of Arch. Arch is fully featured, yet only takes 16mb of memory on bootup. Add in the GUI and it's still sub 48mb. Thats truly small and lightweight. It would have a full featured package manager too with a nice sized repository, but unlike gentoo, nothing is built from source.

In my opinion, Arch would be optimal. Here, I could definitely start on a live system based on Arch with LXDE, would that be acceptable?

In my opinion, Arch would be optimal. Here, I could definitely start on a live system based on Arch with LXDE, would that be acceptable?

That would be rather awesome. The only thing I don't like about Arch is the fact that it is so bleeding edge. AUR/ABS/Arch in general is awesome, but using a rolling release distro for this may mean having to re-release constantly (because people just want to burn it to the USB key, not burn, boot and pacman -Syu).

In my opinion, Arch would be optimal. Here, I could definitely start on a live system based on Arch with LXDE, would that be acceptable?

That would be rather awesome. The only thing I don't like about Arch is the fact that it is so bleeding edge. AUR/ABS/Arch in general is awesome, but using a rolling release distro for this may mean having to re-release constantly (because people just want to burn it to the USB key, not burn, boot and pacman -Syu).

True, but we wouldn't necessarily need to worry about that. If the user wanted to pacman other software, they could, and since it's a write-able USB, that would work fine. We could release simple patch-style updates, i.e. only patch system files and leave out the multi-gig Xonotic data.

True, but we wouldn't necessarily need to worry about that. If the user wanted to pacman other software, they could, and since it's a write-able USB, that would work fine. We could release simple patch-style updates, i.e. only patch system files and leave out the multi-gig Xonotic data.

Actually, come to think of it Slitaz is perfect for this. It's already a stripped back LXDE distro for USBs, so if it works with Xonotic it could be handy. It would probably mean that nobody could effectively use it as an everyday OS, but that's sort of missing the point of a for-game distro.

Aside: I'll give a cookie to whoever can find a way to put a closing square bracket in a MyBB markup tag attribute.

]True, but we wouldn't necessarily need to worry about that. If the user wanted to pacman other software, they could, and since it's a write-able USB, that would work fine. We could release simple patch-style updates, i.e. only patch system files and leave out the multi-gig Xonotic data.

Actually, come to think of it Slitaz is perfect for this. It's already a stripped back LXDE distro for USBs, so if it works with Xonotic it could be handy. It would probably mean that nobody could effectively use it as an everyday OS, but that's sort of missing the point of a for-game distro.

Aside: I'll give a cookie to whoever can find a way to put a closing square bracket in a MyBB markup tag attribute.

Slitaz uses Openbox, but looks decent, seems more bloated than Arch though. Arch is already designed for a live environment, thats how you install it.

Hello,

I think we should have a StartScreen (on XOrg) then you can Start Xonotic or start a LXDE or IceWM Session with Blender, Firefox and developer and artistic tools. First we need to install a minimal installation of Debian (or Ubuntu) and then build our environment.
But ATI and Linux doesn't work good. nVidia is better for use with many PCs.

I will try to make a Debian-USB-Stick with the propr. nVidia Driver and IceWM with a Xonotic from git.

-Boris

> But ATI and Linux doesn't work good. nVidia is better for use with many PCs.

Do you suggest to put nVidia in XonoticOS's system requirements?