Dreamlinux For Linux

Dreamlinux distribution is a modern and modular Linux system that can be run directly from the CD and optionally be easily installed onto your HD.

Dreamlinux comes with a selection of the best applications designed to meet mostly of your daily needs.

Dreamlinux is based on Debian and Morphix, which means it takes advantages of their best features and adds its own modern development tools.

Being a modular system Dreamlinux allows you to add new modules comprising your preferred applications and build a new Distro that meet your requirements by means of its revolutionary MKDistro tool.

What's New in Dreamlinux 3 Release:

1 - Stability. We have, as I have already mentioned, frozen our working packages to the RC1 ones, with some minor improvements and additions.

2 - Efficiency. Dreamlinux continues to be reported as one of the most efficient Linux distros, in terms of speed and memory consumption. I think no other distro delivers a Gnome environment so clean and with a low comsumption rate. Not to mention Xfce...

3 - Hardware detection (mostly talking about video cards detection): I think I reached a good balance in this area. With normal video cards I guess nobody will experience problems. Those who use video cards made in Mars maybe will continue experiencing flaws. Let's see. Anyway, this is an area in which I am putting a lot of energy and I can guarantee to you that it will continue evolving and improving fast. And remember I am talking about scripts and applications made totally in-house.

4 - Dreamlinux Installer. Now we are addressing (I think) Greeks and Trojans. I have improved DLI in terms of usability and robustness. Now nobody can (I hope) complain that the "way to select the mounting points, filesystems and if it is to be formated or not" is difficult to grab or understand. I have also included the feature of installing to an entire disk, withouth the need to repartition, etc. This, I think, will please the newbies and even some commercial oriented guys. Of course, I am using the principle of least effort here. Nothing is asked to the user, other than providing his/her username and password, root password and box name, and an optional title to the new box in Grub. DLI is creating only two partitions in the HDD: one 1GB swap partition and the rest of the disk dedicated to the root partition. And I am using ext3 to this root partition. I know it is not the most efficient one (actually it is extremely inneficient in formating and setting up the journal) but it proved to be more reliable than reiserfs. Still regarding this issue, I did not have time to try out the other filesystems (xfs and jfs) in this "Entire Disk Install" scheme. What I can (and possibly will) do is to leave this filesystem type partition to reside inside dli.yaml (DLI configuration file) so, if anyone decides to try other filesystem for this specific task, it is just a matter of editing that file and change ext3 to jfs or whatever. I do not recommend xfs as root partition due to a known flaw on the current Grub incarnation regarding this. Unfortunately I did not have the time to test Grub2 as you suggested.This will be addressed in the first upgarde to DL3. Myself, I am using jfs as my root filesystem and xfs as my home one. Another interesting feature I have improved in DLI is to make it possible to install Dreamlinux, regularly or as an "Entire Disk Installation", to a USB HDD. So now, you can carry Dreamlinux in your pocket, with these small-sized USB HDD. The sad note in this process was that I made a confusion and reformated my working USB HDD (250 GB). All the stuff I have collected and developed, since I started the Dreamlinux Project back to 2005, is gone! I have tested all the possibilities we have been discussing in the Forum regarding installations schemes: One partition only, /home in separated partition, Grub installed to mbr, Grub installed to root, etc.. All of them, except for xfs as the root partition (due to that Grub flaw) worked nicely and neatly.

5 - Dreamlinux Pen Installer - This is one long-awaited addition of ours. I have using these two former days only for writing, test, rewrite, retest and be happy with the final results. Now we have (I confidently affirm) the best Pen-Drive (USB STICK, USB flash-driven, whatever you name it) installed distro! I was intending to add this feature to DLI, but decided (yesterday) to have it as a separate application due to its flexibility and features. Simply put, Dreamlinux Community has now a tool to install Dreamlinux iso image to a pen-drive, and does not matter if running Dreamlinux Live or HDD installed. Together with MkDistro LiveRemaster (also appearing refurbished to this new DL3) you can even customize you Distro and install it in a pen-drive in only one shot. What really amazed me in its development (made from scratch) is that I could end up with a system in which you can change the way you like it. Let's say that we develop a new kernel module and make it available to our community. You simply download this new kernel module and replace it (yes, simply replace it!) in your pen-drive installed Dreamlinux! Actually, you can replace anything (I mean it, anything!) in this pen installed Dreamlinux (I am naming its default label to Dream_on_A_Pen) without the need to reinstall! I think everyone will love this new feature. And it is Dreamlinux exclusive. To my knowledge there's nothing similar out there. You'll see for yourself.

6 - One thing I am very dissapointed is not to have had the time to work on my new kernel module (2.6.24 series). BTW, this was in that USB HDD drive I formatted! I think that annoyance reported by piotrpiano and others in that specific thread is not yet being addressed with the official release. Actually I am not sure exactly where the problem resides because I have never experienced it. It seems to be something specific to some kind of hardware, that's why I suspect it is inside the kernel configuration I did. But, as I told you above, this will be our first module to be launched as an upgrade. I have to finish all the current work I am doing today, by mid-night at most, in order to send them to Andre Felipe, who will be closing the iso and uploading to Linorg and possibly to my own website.

7 - There is also some new works regarding graphics design and usability made by Andre Felipe. Some of them is a duplication of what you have done to the awn themes, etc...Dreamlinux is starting to become more and more a real Community distro, as I wish. We hope to select some of our forum members to be more involved in DL development. I remember having read one post of someone that wishes to be part of our Development Team. I will try to locate this post again and invite the guy to work with me directly and assess if he can join us in the Development Team (currently only myself, Andre Felipe and some Ruud Kuin's contributions).