<snipped> <div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">What I want is to combine the worlds of several free operating systems with the "philosophy" of Ubuntu: ease of use, shiny new releases every eye blink , cool community, "business awareness" but - with the combination of several operating systems under Ubuntu - the _full_ choice the free software world gives. Let me specify this - with the things I wrote above in mind- in the example of Ubuntu/OpenSolaris: The original OpenSolaris with its libs and docus and userland (in the OpenSolaris world these are called consolidations) + The packages to get all the functionality of a Ubuntu Release (CD/DVD) from the Blastwave repository (this is a repo which gives the Solaris user an "apt-get like structure". + The Ubuntu specific programs and packages ported to OpenSolaris (for example the installer, the update notifier but also the Gnome adaptations of Ubuntu). Please have in mind here that the OpenSolaris world stays as it is and it is known to the user (with some very little adaptations). This all combined in the Ubuntu repositories , with the apropriate user mailing lists and forums, tested for half year release as Ubuntu/GNU/Linux is tested and released every six months. ("Port" this example to the other proposed operating systems FreeBSD, NetBSD). The end user gets a web-site, where he clicks and chooses the operating system he wants to test/learn/use, where he clicks and chooses the desktop environment and "experience" he wants under the chosen OS (Gnome,KDE,XFCE) where he clicks and chooses the kind of release he wants to download (CD/DVD, mybe USB sticks in the future). So in the end every one would get : the __full__ choice the world of free software gives the user but with the community support structure of Ubuntu today. I hope that my example made it clear what I proposed. </blockquote><div> Hi Gueven, Its an interesting concept, what you are suggesting is a kind of installer script which kicks off & pulls software from different repositories & spits a release at the end (similar perhaps to Garnome, Gentoo builds, a sort of script Mann2003 is supposedly to pull software from various repos <a href="http://ubuntusoftware.info/ultimate/">http://ubuntusoftware.info/ultimate/</a> ) but while they have very specific environments in mind yours is much more larger. Issues right from licensing (every distro. is not under GPL license) (user agrees to each specific license seperately ? ) while downloading, to testing the scripts. Add to that the additional hardware platforms: AMD64, Alpha, i386, MIPS, 68000, PowerPC, Sparc, Sparc64, VAX, Zaurus its truly a manmoth exercise. AFAIK there is/was some talk of dropping official PowerPC support for Ubuntu although community support would be there. Further AFAIK there are only some 30 odd developers who are doing everything from building packages from source, to answering newbie, bug squashing etc. which does take a lotta time I guess. </div> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Thank you for your questions. regards Gueven</blockquote><div> Of course I'm just a user of the distro. so some things I might just get plain wrong. But that's how I see it. It's a great suggestion but is it a good time for doing something like that. I would guess it would have more success if its a community effort rather than the official. At some point if it becomes stable, more functional then there would be possibility of it being on the official list. You could also think of starting it on the ubuntuforums 3rd party project & see the kind of response you get for the project. Who knows it might turn out to be the biggest thing since sliced bread. :) </div></div>-- Shirish Agarwal This work is licensed under the Creative Commons NonCommercial Sampling Plus 1.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/nc-sampling+/1.0/"> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/nc-sampling+/1.0/</a>