Sunday, June 27, 2010

Blessing In Disguise-nFLux-OpenBox-XBMC-

The Window Manager that produced the frenzy activity in the early days of Linux to produce something similar to Microsoft has now come to term with functionality instead of the the flashy looks.

nFlux is the one which has taken root with Slackware, Debian, Ubuntu and Arch Linux and it is much attractive than the the Openbox.

Openbox has its own virtues of saving valuable MB when making a live CD and its trigger happy mouse click activity that opens dialog boxes was a welcome change to heavy KDE but here comes nFlux with a bang.

The live wires of early Linux distributions Debian, Arch and Slackware adopting it to dispense the Light Weight Live CDs is not an accident but the next logical step.

I like all the distributions with nFlux and I hope there will be many more followers including PCLinux.

Writing about XBMC (Multimedia package) is inappropriate here but I have one reasoning that were not answered by both Sabayon and MonomaxOS.

Even though they have incorporated XBMC (which is good and encouraging to say the least) in their distributions XBMC drains a lot of resources for its functionality.

There is no coordination of mouse activity and XBMC and mouse often freezes.

The solution to this is to dispense XBMC as a live CD distribution with light weight window manager like Openbox or nFlux.

If it still has enough MiB left to fill a CD-700 MiB limit one can add some light weight games and abiword to push its boundaries for general use.

Adding general utilities should be a marketing strategy well worth investing with sportsmen in mind ( carrying laptops with Linux).

We missed the Football World Cup but we can come up with a Linux for the Cricket World Cup.

Players need to relax before an important game Laptop with videos and games and XBMC would be most welcome away from (this idea is free to exploit but you must send me a few Linux laptops to sell and make few bucks while U/I wait in between games) media men.

Since Linux is far behind in games this "games console" with video output is a blessing in disguise for developers to log onto.

Once they got the CD right, the next stage is to expand and make a DVD distribution with added load and functionality

That is my futuristic thinking.


Slow but sure we can close the existing gap and come out champions!

Hope Sabayon and MonomaxOS shows us the way if not Morphix, Arch or Debian!