The sudden growth and demand for eeebuntu has taken me by complete surprise. From it's origins of a simple distro cobbled together for my eee and then shared with a few friends to 15000+ downloads and torrent hits. It's been a rocketing time.

Unfortunately, work is demanding and I have found that my time is quite limited at the moment. Saying that, there is a an rc2 ready to go (will upload tomorrow evening).

So, to get to the point. I sort of need a hand getting things together. I'm not the best coordinated person in the world so things are approached using the entropy methods of project management.

I need some help getting the iso together, making sure the apps work with the eee, trawling the forum and finding solutions to problems.

Any help is gratefully received and especially so if you live NW uk - Manchester/Liverpool/Cheshire....

Drop me a line if you feel you can help out.

Hi Bezomny,

I don't have much time to be twiddling with packages or building ISOs these days, but I would be happy to set-up and help administer a launchpad project for eeebuntu... I just set one up this past Saturday with bzr code hosting for libDJConsole.

Another possibility is to consider a merger with ubuntu-eee... Since they seem to be focused on similar goals.

Anyway, hope you are able to upload your next RC soon... I managed to demolish your Gutsy image upgrading it to Hardy by hand. lol.

Cheers,

-G

I'm new to Linux so couldn't help with the technical nature of things;
but I would suggest that in order to solicit genuinely helpful help you should publicly set out a project mantra and/or a manifesto/set of goals so that people can latch on to a commonly agreed upon direction for the project. Check out the Mozilla Manifesto as an excellent example. http://www.mozilla.org/about/mozilla-manifesto.html

This will help unify helpers under a set of common goals, set a light at the end of the tunnel for people to work toward, and clearly differentiate eeebunutu, aiding towards a strong and recognisable brand or perceived image.

The other things you could do to promote your efforts and indirectly attract new developers include documenting the process by which you do your builds (or documenting which process it is, if you are using someone else's method), releasing more frequently, trying not to commit to too much (which helps keep the number of changes between releases manageable and help get releases out when you say you plan to...)...

As an example of this, I'm thinking you might be tinkering with the RC2 release trying to add too many new things since the RC1 release which might be why we have not seen it uploaded yet... People are going to start thinking the project has stalled (they will look to other projects that release more often), or fragmented because of the discussions about the different directions you are exploring in the forum (UME, Hardy, Ibex) -> this won't attract new developers.

Being a one man team, you should pick your battles carefully and focus on trying not to let them last too long, else you might be overwhelmed by them.

-G

I am a web developer with (an and off) 6 years experience of working in a collaborative development environment. My Linux knowledge is limited but I would be happy to lend a hand if I am able.

I live in the diagonally opposite side of the country (Suffolk for my sins!) but the project that I work with has developers in the UK, Norway, USA, Canada, Brazil and Turkey!

Hope this helps?

Well any help is gratefully received. Any good with art packages?

Thanks for the words of wisdom g. I guess trying to do too much at once will lead to a delay on the whole. So, with that in mind, I have changed as much as I can for now, shelved a few other projects and put in the minimum of script changes to get a workable version out into the wild.

Any large changes or custom application/scripts will be phased in over the releases rather than being allowed to delay getting it out to you folks.

The iso is packaged and the request for more server space is in progress. This time we'll have 30GB. So with any luck it'll hit the site for download around Thursday/Fri evening 13/14 and hopefully with improved bandwidth.

Steve.

Another possible idea is to host this up on a SourceForge like site so that you can allows folks to work on the svn/cvs for updates, script changes, etc etc.

I would very much be into helping out both in keeping things up to date and in working in new ideas.

-tomhiggins

I am a web developer expert in Joomla and good with Photoshop. If you need any help in terms of improving the website, logos, artwork, etc. I am available. I'm not a Linux Guru...

http://www.netgifted.com

Netgifted I may just take you up on that. Also there may be other paid work if you're up for it. Of course, this does depend on my own workload. You've probably noticed that the main eeebuntu site is joomla anyway. If you have some templates or something you think would look good then PM me and I'll give you my main email address.

g I've spoken to Jon of Ubuntu-eee a few times and whilst these things are kept seperate I have no doubt there will be the continuation of information exchange and a borrowing of ideas. From experience when things like this merge there is always some friction and some divide that can have ill effects on the long term goals. Besides, freedom of choice is just one of Linux's great points

splatthecat Same as Netgifted, if you fancy adding content to the main site I'll be happy to set you up with an account (you may have already noticed the "LOGIN" item appearing on the menu. Also, we probably need a page similar to the hardy firefox default page just to give users an insight into what they've installed.

tomwsmfeee I think we probably do need to go ahead with the sourceforge thing, mainly for the config scripts and the stuff that is currently in development (graphical configuration tool for the eee, gnome-look wallpaper, icon and theme manager, install/rebuild scripts etc). It is probably a good way to share these things and get a bit more exposure for the project and hopefully help it expand onto other UMPC platforms - need a name for that one

Thanks for the replies guys.

Steve.

I'm happy to help out. I've come from a windows/dos programming background, and have some experiance with building linuxfromscratch.org boxes.

I'll have to get up to speed on how you package an iso etc, any websites you can recomend?

Merlinblack

happy to help - linux user/breaker for over a decade, great at testing strength is documentation & howtos. (used to teach software engineers, still a bit of a document junkie...)

Documentation? Sorry, lost me. Isn't that the bit at the end of a project when you transfer the notes off the back of the cigarette packet to some sort of word processing thing?

I'll sort you out with a login on the main site so you can feel free to update the FAQs or add in anything you feel would be useful to people if you wish? I'm the typical build first, document later software engineer as is evident from the sketchy documentation lying around here...

As for testing, feel free to break things (it doesn't take much) and post your woes.

Any help is gratefully received.


Steve.

I can't promise i'll have alot of spare time once the semester starts in august, but I can definitely try and tackle a few problems while I can.

I'm currently working on an embedded linux kernel (uClinux) for our satellite project here at the university, and that means writing custom hardware to userspace kernel drivers for the SPI and I2C bus's on the microcontroller, as well as general kernel development. I'm just getting into it, but i'm learning as I go, and just got the General Purpose I/O's on our dev board working with a driver. It's pretty neat.

I'd love to lend a hand with something, if you have anything that could use my area of knowledge.

I'm curious, are you using anything for project management?
As your number of developers grow, it might be usefull to have some sotware for project tasks, and tickets assigned to different developers.
Maybe take a look at dot project (www.dotproject.net) or trac (http://trac.edgewall.org/). I've used both in different projects, and they are quite useful.

If you still need a hand, let me know if/how I can get involved.

As there is only really me developing it the tracking is done by me reading the forums and when someone mentions something I forgot I add it in

Not that bad really, I just keep a note of all the things going on and it isn't really planned at the moment as my work (need to pay the bills) gets in the way a bit.

If this does start to turn into a larger project then I would probably run trac or something similar, hosted on a seperate VM.

As for the future development?

- Build the kernel from the latest release (as with Array's)
- Set up the repository
- Develop a few small applications to replace running scripts manually
- Expand the platform scope (there are a plethora of UMPCs coming this way)
- Trim the fat from the edges and look to find methods of speed improvement
- Track and fix errors/bugs
- Feed back any generic application fixes to source developers


That's all I can think of (notes at home so from memory), if you have any more to add to the list, feel free.

Steve.