August 06, 2009

Progress with Pardusman on Web

Hi all,

I have been working on developing custom web based distro creator for Pardus project. Pardus is arguably the best KDE 4.2 distro I have ever seen. Pardus 2009 comes with lots of packages bundled with KDE 4.2. It has a batteries included effect. I have been running Pardus 2008 with KDE 3.8 on my desktop at home and my parents are happy with it. It comes with all applications and plugins required by a regular user. Also the package management system of Pardus, PISI is a new generation package management system. It is awesome. Pardus repo comes with hell lot of packages :)

I have significant coding progress with Pardusman, the custom distro building application which I am involved with coding. web-pardusman comes with a wizard interface, where user can customise each and every thing using the wizard steps. Now, the web-pardusman can build custom distro images with following specifications given by the user.

Live or Install image
Custom distro name
Hostname
Default username
root password, user password
Default language, other languages to be bundled
Default wallpaper
Release file in the CDRom root
User home directory contents
Custom Packages, with component and induvidual packages listing
Image type: ISO, and other virtualization images

Currently I have completed upto building ISO images. Support for virtualization images are in the TODO list.

Web-Pardusman has a schedulder queue where each distro build request will be queued according to the server build capacity and at a time specific number of builds will be processed. After the build, next request will be accpeted from the queue.

From the Userlog page, users can download the completed image, log file and project file used for the build.

I will upload a screencast after the Pardusman is up at pardusman.pardus.org.tr,

You can grab the code from the github repository, git://github.com/t3rm1n4l/pardusman.git

Have a look at the current progress screenshots and comment !