The AltimatOS Logo Contest

OK, as people probably have noted from the logo in the upper corner of AI, the temp logo I threw together in 20 minutes is nothing more than Konqueror's Crystal Icon with AltimatOS in ElsiaInline, Thin font. This has been fine for a preliminary placeholder logo, but as I am getting closer to completing AI's user interface and finishing the packaging needed to get AltimatOS ready for it's preliminary beta, I feel it's not enough.

Because of this, I'm pleased to announce the AltimatOS Logo Contest! We're looking for a logo that emphasis the beauty and extensibility that makes up our OS. While some would throw Tux in there, please don't. We are not designing another Linux, but a coherent operating system; one designed for the average user, not the tech.

So you may ask, what's in it for me as the artist?

Well, the grand prize winner will walk away with both an ASUS Eee PC and every release of AltimatOS' planned commercial releases for free. This means that we'll send you one of the first discs mastered of the final releases at each release, without charge for shipping. The second and third place submissions will be given the first release edition of AltimatOS Desktop Edition on DVD for free.

And now for the rules:
1. All artwork submissions must be original artwork, without exception.
2. We require all submissions to be in digital formats (SVG, PNG, etc.)
3. Vector images are preferred.
4. If your work has been selected as the winner, it becomes the exclusive property of YggdrasilSoft, LLC. At that time, we require that all original sources for the artwork be sent to us and copyright and trademark rights be transferred to us. This also means that you may not in anyway keep copies of the artwork without prior consent of YggdrasilSoft, LLC.
5. If your artwork is not selected as the winning piece, we will destroy our copy to ensure that we do not violate your rights to the artwork.
6. During the contest you will grant us the right to place your artwork on display on our website(s) for open commentary.
7. The artwork should match the style of the Crystal Icon Set as designed by Everaldo for the KDE project.
8. This contest will run until July 4th, 2008. At the end of the contest, the core team for AltimatOS will judge the artwork based on the effectiveness of branding and beauty to select the new logo for our operating system.

There, done with the stuffy part! Happy vectoring! :D

Progress

The simplicity of Qt and KDE never ceases to amaze me... With far less lines of code than if I'd been using something like WxWidgets or MSVC, I've a rich interface for an application. See the screenshots:










As can be easily seen, I've a fair amount done, and these aren't even recent screenshots. On the backend, we're likely going to be using INI and YAML for kickstart files. INI for the main portions and YAML for the partitioner though that is still under consideration.

Syntax bitches!

Ok, I guess I need to read the docs on a class BEFORE just assuming that it'd work the way other Qt/KDE classes work.... Case and point KListViewSearchLineWidget (say that ten times fast, I dare you...)

Unlike most classes in KDE which take the parent as the first entry, it takes the KListView that the search will be tied to. This is, in my opinion, the epitome of inconsistent code design :( After spending two days getting that widget to display and run properly, I finally broke down and read the documentation.

Yeah, yeah... I should have read the fine manual earlier, but I had gotten lulled into a false sense of thinking that "this is KDE code, it'll be logical with how it handles constructing the object and it will be consistent". This learns me one....

Making my projects known

Today I finally updated the www.kde-apps.org entry for Phinos (Phinos Installs the OS), which died a grueling death when I was so rudely shoved out of the PhoeNUX OS project. Now, it is reborn as AI, the AltimatOS Installer.

As before with Phinos, I aim to allow AI to be distro agnostic, with welcomed help from the community. The code is much cleaner now, whereas before it was a wreck being my second major project in PerlQt.

If you are interested in taking a look at the sources (as there hasn't been a finalized release yet) see http://svn.tabris.net/repos/ai/.

On the act of moving....

Moving from one place to another might seem like such a nice thing to do, however at this point, I'm finding that I'm hating the "doing" aspect of it more and more...

Today I spent the day cleaning the old apartment just so I can get the entire 3500 USD deposit back from them. This is only _one_ of many aspects that I really loath in the process. The packing, unpacking, breaking stuff in the move, eating up my time.....

You'd think that after two cross continental moves, and 12+ moves while at college, I'd be used to it somehow. Guess I'm just getting tired of it.

w00t! Qt::Process FTW!

I've worked on getting the backend to CuteDisk as used by AI, AltimatOS' Installer, to use Qt::Process for grabbing info from the OS for the disks, and Holy Mother of God is it fast! No more UI blocking, no more nashing of teeth trying diligently to get Proc::Simple to behave while interacting with RPM, just the snappy processing of commands :D

As you can clearly see, I'm geeked :)

Progress

I've been working on AltimatOS' installer and website over the last few evenings and things are shaping up. :)

Since talking to ossi, I've managed to get QProcess to behave with PerlQt reasonably well. This has allowed me to finally setup a fair amount of the CuteDisk backend code, and keep the AI user interface free from blocking.

On the web front, we've actually gotten a decent amount done. This allows me to focus my attention on AI, PHADS, and Foreman Build Daemon so we can get things done for our goal of an early May installable beta of the OS for people to start banging on. See www.altimatos.com for more details.