alt Hacker NewsJust to be clear, I did not write these patches, but have collected many like this via scouring the net. I think I did make the ATK one though.
If you'd like to be an alpha/beta/release tester of this system, hit me up via email please. I'll start with an initial closed alpha release here in a month or so, if there's interest.
Now for the donation drive: I have plenty of time and a stable situation to work on this system, but the one drawback is I have little funds--and unfortunately my workstation is getting pretty long in the tooth. (AMD FX. It's been a good system, but I'm getting Left Behind here.) The main thing holding me back is compile speed, especially doing work on Chromium and WebKit. It's 12+ hour compile times for either of those, with the latest C++ standards they're using. The system as a whole builds in about 48 hours on my computer.
So I'm hoping to bump into an "angel investor" who either has some old Xeon (Broadwell or newer?) hardware laying around they would donate, something with lots of cores and memory, or who can make a cash donation for me to buy the gear I'm looking at on Ebay. $400-500 is enough for a nice 5x upgrade. It amazes me how cheap this stuff is. We're talking $5000+ hardware when it was new, for peanuts. Still quite powerful.
(A better video card would be great too, if you're feeling generous. Mine is a GTX570. I'd love to have a GTX7xx or newer, or equivalent AMD. That's more of a want than a need however.)
I'm very interested in ppc64 gear too. I want this system to have first-class PPC support. Anyone got an old POWER8 or POWER9 system laying around, or 32-bit stuff? I've got this system building OK in Qemu for ppc64le but it is SLOW, as you can imagine. Like 5 seconds per line in configure scripts, lol.
If anyone out there is in a position where they can help this project in some way, email me please! Thank you.
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By the way--I did not want to disable ATK to get rid of dbus, but only did so temporarily. Ultimately a better solution is to create a UNIX socket just for the ATK<>GTK bridge.
Accessibility should be something that the system fully supports. There is speech synthesis and other useful bits installed so far. Maybe someone would like to work on this project. Email me if interested.
I'm sorry to tell you, but I'm not really interested in a new distribution. I appreciate the effort of what you are trying to do, but I think you are wasting time maintaining a distribution instead of maintaining patches (or a fork). If you have the know-how to patch those cancers out, then do only that and let other people do the packaging. Just make them known and available - a github repo maybe?
So, I'm not going to test your distro or switch from my Gentoo. I like Gentoo a lot, most of all because it's so very-very easy to patch any official package. Just put the patch in /etc/portage/patches/<package> and that's it. It gets automatically applied on the next install.
I'm using a Phenom II x6 1100 on a Gigabyte 880G. Firefox compiles in about 3-4 hours I think, not really sure. I do all Gentoo updates over night and it's usually ready in the morning. I can't say about Chromium or webkit - never used them - but 12h seems waaay too long.