Engineering branch remaster

[CAVT]

Hello all. I'm currently finishing my studies in Aeronautical Engineering, and since a good time I've been using with joy CAELinux 2008, which is a remaster of PCLOS 2007. Thedistro is very nice, the apps are very well seleted and I certainly reccomend it for any mechanical engineering student (and alikes), as it provides equivalents to very expensive commercial softwares already installed and configured (most of them are not in the repos of any distro, so you may need to compile).
Well, the thing is that the nwer CAELinux versions are based on Ubuntu and only for 64bit systems. Ubuntu is not bad, but it's not what you would call a feather-weight, specially when you need to have a lot of apps opened at the same time and many of them using RAM and CPU with hunger. Also, 64bit software forces to have a more expensive hardware (where I live it's not the most desirable, specially if you're a student). So my idea is to (in a future) restart making a 32bit engineering oriented distro, basically an updated clon of CAELinux 2008, but with a lightweight system as a base. TinyMe already provides common everyday apps, is small, thus allowing to include more apps in a single DVD, and easy to port from Windows. My idea then would be to propose it's use in my uni and distribute it for free among the students.
Now that I've made that introduction, I would like to know in which state is the TinyMe repository compared to PCLOS, specially regarding science-related software and libraries. For example, many OSS can be found as fortran files, and sometimes GCC fails to compile them, but gfortran or g77 does it very well. Then other apps like LabPlot and RKWard are very nice to have. I want to know this so to know if I can be able to start the project or I should wait until the repos are more complete, or in any case if I can use PCLOS/Mandriva rpms in case the corresponding ones are not available in TinyMe/Unity list. Oh, I almost forgot, is it posible also to use Synaptic instead of Smart? I was going to do everything with TinyMe 2008, but I didn't because I understand updating it will bork the system...
Thank you,

César

[z3r0_k00l75]

As far as I can tell Synaptic isn't in the repo's and there aren't any plans to include it. On the other hand I have successfully used pclos, mandriva and fedora rpm's in Unity without a problem. I have heard, but not tried, that even Suse rpm's will work. I guess it just depends on how far you are willing to go to satisfy the dependencies such software may bring up that aren't in the repo's.
You may want to consider using the Unity Core for remasters. It is what TinyMe is based off of and specifically designed to be used as a base for branching from or remastering. All the help and support of the Unity community will be made available should you decide to do so. http://unity-linux.org/ http://forum.unity-linux.org// and on freenode #unitylinux Hope to see you around.

[CAVT]

Thank you for your reply. I have also used sucesfully many Suse rpms in PCLOS, I think even from RedHat and never had a problem. Your informaion about other distros rpms is valuable to me, so I think it will be possible to accomplish my recquirements.
The reason I want to use TinyMe instead of just Unity is because TinyMe's iso is smaller (just acouple of MBs, but still smaller) and already includes a suite of software aready working that facilitates me the task of selecting the basic apps and allows me to focus on the specific scientific software I need. I mean, looking at the live cds of both ditros, TinyMe is already Unity (as you point out) plus the basic for everyday work and optimized for low-end hardware. If the TinyMe based version is succesful, I'll try the same with Unity 64bit for more modern machines.
I'm from Argentina and here many students (perhaps most) still have Celerons with 128/256/512MB of Ram, and even downgraded (also illegal) Windows strugle to work smoothly. A lightweight systm like TinyMe will allow those PCs to run perhaps faster than Athlons and Core Duos with Vista or Seven.
I don't know when I will start with this, but I'll keep the forum informed, and will make the final product available

[z3r0_k00l75]

The only reason that TinyMe is a smaller iso is that it is english language only where-as the Unity-Core iso has support for very many different languages (probably your native language is supported). And I currently use the Unity openbox on a 733Mhz pentium3 with 384 ram without a problem and indeed it is faster than my friends pentium4 @ 2.0 GHz running windowsXP any day of the week The legacy kernel is available in the repo as well, although I haven't a need for it as I currently have no machine that old.
But should you decide to make TinyMe your base for a future remaster you can still use all of the resources that Unity itself can offer, help with packaging, branding and just the wealth of knowledge that has been gained by all the other members. We are always on the lookout for like-minded people to join in and discuss the problems, triumphs and frustrations that building a branch/remaster can present, especially when starting from scratch in unfamiliar territory.
TinyMe is kdulcimer's incredible brainchild, but he basically does TinyMe by himself while also attending university so he would probably point you to Unity himself should you need help in the future as he is quite busy (as you yourself know, since you are currently finishing your own degree) and we would be more than happy to help you acomplish your goal of a distro specific to your needs.

[CAVT]

Ah, now that clears me the panorama. Great, then I'll comment it to one of my profs who's also a Linux fan, he'll like the idea surely. Let's see how this goes.

[z3r0_k00l75]

Glad to be of help