Download:
xpud-0.8.9.iso (49MB)
Website:
http://www.xpud.orgIt's been a while since our last update, and we are really excited about this new version of
xPUD, a fundamentally improved release with lots of new features, including:
Linux Kernel 2.6.28 applied with
fast boot patch from Moblin, full set of tools for network configuration, a totally rewritten build system
mkxpud, and our experimental user interface
plate is now shipped as XUL application.
New Features:
Better hardware support
By carefully setting up udev, hotplug and ALSA, we achieved the goal to easily runs on Netbooks/MIDs. The boot up speed is even faster, and screen resolution is now auto-detected, too.
You can download the kernel
modules to get full support, here's the built-in hardware list:
Audio: Intel HD Audio
Graphic: Integrated Intel Graphic
LAN/Wired: RealTek 8139/8169, Broadcom ATL1/ATL2
Wireless/WiFi: Atheros 5K/9K, RealTek 8180/8187
Tested Platform: Acer AspireOne 101, Asus EeePC 900
Much More Powerful Plate UI
The whole UI is now packed into
XUL application, and we squashed in some rich client applications like
transmission,
mplayer and a full-featured browser that using
firefox nightly build (3.6a1pre). The bitmap version of Uming font is replaced with
Droid fonts, the best fonts for mobile device from Android. Also
SCIM-Chewing input method is added, we can now provide multi-language support in these kind of small image.
Bunch of handy Tools
xPUD 0.8.9 comes with some network tools like
ifconfig,
iwconfig,
wpa_supplicant for WiFi setting,
wvdial for 3G connection, and
ppp,
dhclient for Ethernet. There is also a web-based interface that helps you getting on the Internet.
Some important tools are also included, too. For example
GRUB and
kexec that can boot directly from xPUD into other OS. Matchbox window manager is replaced by
Openbox for better hotkey setting. You can press
ALT-F2 to bring up the xterm at any time for easier debugging.
Efficient Build System: mkxpud
mkxpud is an open source project hosted on
Github, it's still in the early stage of developing, and feedback are all welcomed. This is a tool wrote from scratch for xPUD project.
mkxpud is an image generator, and a binary-level build system very similar to
Woof of Puppy Linux.
We don't want to handle the package dependencies, so we just leverage APT/dpkg. When running
mkxpud, it reads project config (called
cookbook), parse it into package settings (called
recipe),
strips directly from a working Debian/Ubuntu Linux, extracts them into root filesystem and finally generates image.
It's very flexible, the whole rootfs can be configured by single file, also can be extended with multiple recipes. It's very efficient, too. Making an image is less then 50 seconds on my laptop, and the result is very small, as you can see, the xPUD release.
Utilities
- xpud-0.8.9-mod.tgz
This is the complete modules compiled against the same kernel config, and can be put onto USB flash drive then use after booting.
- xpud-0.8.9.zip
Besides the default LiveCD version, here's the LiveUSB format that comes with the same boot menu.
- xpud-0.8.9-rootfs.gz
If you want to customize xPUD with your own kernel, here's the root filesystem, it's a CPIO archive and GZIP compressed.
- mkxpud-0.8.9.tgz
This is an export from the Git repository, contains exactly the same
configuration files that builds this version of xPUD. It's been tested on Ubuntu 8.10, you can run it with ./tools/mkxpud all.
- linux-source-2.6.28.tar.bz2
The kernel source with patches.
Known Issue
- Kernel not build automatically
mkxpud is not finished, so the kernel image generating and module copying function is still not yet implemented.
- Increased memory consumption
The system requirement is about 384MB of RAM. Because at this stage we are focused on features, haven't start optimizing on footprint and memory usage. So this issue will be addressed in the next version (0.9).
Contact Us
This project is under heavy development, and we're looking forward to any kind of feedback, please post on our Developers Forum, or contact me directly. :-)
Ping-Hsun Chen (penk) <
penkia@gmail.com>
