Entries by Greg Meyer

We're about 4 days away from the end of the fundraising drive, and I am really quite taken aback by the generosity of some people. We have had single donations of 100EUR and higher, as well as poor college students skipping lunch for a couple of days to give $5.

Of course, this pales in comparison to the value of the time many dedicated people have put into the development of the product, but I know it is done out of their love for music and their love for amaroK. So for them it may not seem like a donation, since it is something they enjoy working on. So to enable the effort to continue because so many users sacrificed some money to allow project expenses to be paid requires a gigantic thank you.

If you have given, thank you; if you have not given and are able to, please do. If you would like to contribute but cannot afford the expense, we always welcome spreading the word, either by telling people about amaroK, giving away copies of the amaroK LiveCD or by simply using it and providing feedback to make it better. Those are all invaluable contributions in and of themselves, and are a big part of what makes FLOSS work.

As we come upon the end, it is becoming clear that we probably won't make the goal without either extending the deadline or having a large benefactor come through and makeup the difference. Not sure what to do yet, but I guess we wait to see what the weekend brings.

Thank you again for your support, and roK on!

Well, I am totally blown away by the fact that we have had 9,118 downloads of amaroK Live from all sources, ftp, http and bittorrent. This is far more than i was expecting, and it is very exciting.

So, with the first one being so successful, planning must begin on how to top it for the 1.3 release of amaroK. Several ideas have been discussed with regard to acquiring music to include, and I have settled on approaching Magnatune first about sponsoring it by providing 16 tracks that we would have permission to distribute. I have sent them a letter and we await their response.

Other ideas included putting out a general call for music, kind of like how the last icon was developed, or doing a friends and family edition, where musicians that the amaroK devs know would get featured. Ultimately, I think doing a joint promotion with another group that would have an interest in success is the way to go.

As far as features go, I'd love to hear all your ideas, either in the amaroK Live forum, here in the comments, posted to the amaroK-devel mailing list or brought up in #amarok on freenode.

Well, 9 more images and a lot of tweaking (mostly to make the LiveCD regress properly if the target machine has no net connection) and adding a lot of polish and details, it is done. Build 44 is the offical amaroK LiveCD v1.2.1. Enjoy.

A torrent should be up by 5:00PM EST on March 3, once I get the image distributed to some seeders.

I am sad since there will be a delay in getting a final iso out for amaroK LiveCD. The final tweaking is taking a lot of time, and I am trying to resolve a few minor issues to make this thing work on as many machines as possible. The last I want to happen is for this thing to suck and have people blast amaroK because it doesn't work right.

I received some late feedback from a couple of the testers that made me want to do one more revision. Most of the problem are little details (polish, if you will) that make the cd regress properly if things like the network are unavailable, etc.

I will post more later, but it will be out soon.

Well, after 35 iso images, amaroK LiveCD version 1.2.1 looks done. I am doing some final testing but I should be able to get it distributed tomorrow. This has been quite an interesting project for me, mostly because it is the first contribution other than bug reporting and documentation I have made to an OSS project. I am not a coder, so the most I can usually contribute is bug testing, money and encouragement (complaints). I learned a lot, made some friends and had a lot of fun.

Thanks to Mark, Max and Chris for making this such an easy thing to contribute, to Kobsession and Tightcode for your assistance with artwork (why do graphic artists never use their real names), to all the people that tested this, to Texstar for making PCLinuxOS so easy to work with and packaging so many things upon request, to Tom Kelly for maintaining the mklivecd scripts and to everyone else that I annoyed over the last three weeks.

Things I learned:

- How to remove too many packages from a linux installation and end up with an unbootable system
- How to make a syslinux bootscreen with gif2lss
- How to make a bootsplash theme
- Why the Creative Commons licenses are really cool
- How to use cd-rw's instead of cdr's when working on a Live CD project
- How to use scp (never heard of it, but it is cool)
- How to make a torrent and get a tracker running

and I got a much better understanding of how ALSA works.

Check it out at http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/index.php/AmaroK_Live

Now, what do I do with all these iso images?