Pacman Linux 0.1

Pacman Linux is another Linux distribution focused on desktop - that is territory where is Linux not very often used.

Developer comments

My distribution is aimed for immediate ability to do everyday common tasks like creating documents (LibreOffice or my personal choice LaTeX) or working with graphics (gimp - old one like I like it and mouth shouting cinepaint, for vector based gfx I use old xfig so it is included too. Blender is on way). When you create something you would like to share it probably somehow (locally we have NFS, and samba for web we have FirefoX or my beloved links, Thunderbird and Skype) or print it (cups or ghostscript). As a bonus you can probably run your favourite || required windows or dos application (trough wine or dosbox). From more specialized tools we have whole (geda package or mysql I would like to provide OpenFoam also). After work you can enjoy multimedia (xmms or thread supporting Mplayer). We have also some games - just to make life more funny (nquake, zsnes and dgen - both emulators).

Ofcourse there are many peoples witch are using totally another set of applications if they like way how pacman works probably they can install some other packages trough foreign package managers (rpm or installpkg). Also since pacman don't hide anything (like include files) you are free to build your desired application for your own.

All this are applications witch hopefully allows yours everyday work. Of course there are many more - but these are most visible for ordionary user so they are most important. My goal is one - that when you put USBstick with pacman installation to your's machine you will have reasonably (means fast) working system with wide set of applications within less than 30 minutes. But what should be best - with minimal configuration needet. You can easily say - almost like Obuntu ,,Linux for human beings''. But pacman is another - pacman is ,,Linux with Linux flavor''. Pacman is Linux and I won't hide it. In pacman I use simple but nice desktop manager witch don't eat too much resources. In pacman ALL applications are compiled with optimizations for size and ofcourse without debugging - this should help them to run in parallel without wasting cache of CPU - ordinary state of using desktop.

Pacman linux installer is very minimalistic kernel with some utilities (mostly busybox) included in cpio archive directly in kernel itself. So running installation just means Booting kernel itself (on my system it is done in less than 4 seconds. You may need to run /usr/installer/start.sh by hand - because pacman is still in rush development and sometimes I need to check what is going on (like lspci)... When installer will reach good compatibility level you'll just boot directly to installation.

If you encounter any problems with installer or system itself please contact me (tomo.hornacek@gmail.com). It will be also nice if you contact me for just saying "feelings from installer/ system" good or bad doesn't matter"

Simple HowTo install:

 1) Download latest installer or burn on CD pacman's installer iso and boot directly to installation
 2) Boot it somehow - I mostly used lilo with parameter to boot installer kenrel, and all this stuff is put on USB stick. You can probably use loadlin utility and boot from DOS, but easiest running of installer should be burning it to CD and booting it trough BIOS - this time tested only in qemu.
 3) For network installation you will need - internet connection to pacman.linuxd.org and prefferably DHCP server witch will provide you IP address. This time only wired network cards are supported. If you can't install trough network and installer don't asks you for IP, than please contact me - It probably means that yours network card is currently not supported in pacman installer. I'll add it (really I would love to see more peoples using pacman) and than you can try installation again. Installer partition is exact

$dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=installer_partition

copy of my USB booting partition. It uses ext2 filesystem.
 4) If you would like to install pacman locally, than just copy all contents from packages to any partition on yours installer USB stick or just to yours windows hard drive. But packages *MUST* be placed in root in pacman_installer_packages directory. Otherwise installer won't recognize them.


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