Vinux Conference a Success!

I am pleased to say that the online meeting to discuss the future development of Vinux took place last night and we had about thirty participants on and off, although some people had a few teething problems using IRC for the first time. It was decided that Vinux would continue to be based on Ubuntu for the time being, but that we would look into the possibility of building upon Debian Mint and/or Squeeze in the meantime, just in case Ubuntu 11.04 and/or the new Unity desktop and the Wayland Display Server cause any unexpected accessibility issues. Ten members of the Vinux Support/Development List were also duly elected as Team Coordinators: BuildScripts - Tony Sales, Software Development - Don Marang, Testing - Nimer Jaber, Website - Mobeen Iqbal, Publicity - Storm Dragon, Fundraising - Arianna Sepulveda, Documentation is shared by Nimer Jaber, Krishnakant and Merrill Woolnough, and we accepted offers for Translated Versions of Vinux from Kris (Dutch), Ferdinand/Joey (German) , Cleverson/Rui (Portuguese) and Burt (Spanish).

Vinux IRC Meeting Agenda:

Event: Vinux Development Meeting
Date: Saturday 22nd January
Time 21:00 GMT
Location: irc.blufudge.net #vinux

Agenda

1. Development Roles

As always the main problem faced by the Vinux Project is the relatively small number of people who are willing and able to contribute in some way. I would like to recruit more people to help with development and try to formalise the different roles. As I see it there are six distinct roles, which could assigned to an individual or shared between a small team, and of course there is nothing to stop one person performing more than one role if they wish. The six roles are:

A. Build Script Team - Writing and testing the build scripts then producing the final releases of Vinux.

B. Software Development Team - Writing and testing new packages then adding them to the Vinux repository.

C. Testing Team - Testing individually assigned packages in the alpha,beta and release candidates and passing the feedback to the build script and/or software development team.

D. Translations Team - Creating Vinux isos in new languages once the build script is finalised and uploading them to the website and/or mirrors.

E. Website/Hosting Team - Maintaining the website, wiki, mirrors, mailing lists and publicity etc.

F. Documentation Team - Writing how-to articles for the Quickstart Guide and the Vinux Manual.

Initially we just need people to volunteer to be part of a team, and depending upon the number of responses we get, I would then like to appoint a member of each team as the coordinator of that team.

2. Which distribution should we base Vinux on?

This is another issue which crops up every year - should we stick with Ubuntu, or switch to another distro. Ubuntu offers many advantages such as hardware compatibility, but it has a very fast release cycle and is planning to make some major changes in its next release (Gnome>Unity and Xorg>Wayland) and we have no idea how this will effect accessibility. There are other distributions we could base Vinux on including: Debian, Linux Mint and PCLInuxOS - however the one that holds the most promise at the moment is Debian Mint. This offers the hardware detection of Ubuntu, with a rolling release based on Debian Squeeze, meaning once installed there shouldn't ever be a need to reinstall. So the question is: do we stick with Ubuntu, Switch to Debian Mint or develop both in parallel initially to see what happens. The answer to this will depend largely on whether we have enough people to support two versions or not, and of course whether people think this is a good idea or not.

3. Any Other Business