Due to Debian 6 (Squeeze) will be releasing soon, estimated about mid of next year. I find it unnecessary to build DN-A based on Debian 5 (Lenny) anymore. So, it means I will stick to my old plan, using Squeeze for the Angel release.
Therefore, this project will be postpone until Debian Squeeze is release, since until now, I also haven’t done much on the Debian Lenny version of DN-A yet.
If you do not know what is Debian Netbook-Angel(DN-A), please read this post ==> DN-A: Debian Netbook-Angel
The decision on the desktop environment, currently is still using the Ubuntu 9.04’s UNR.
There is some work to be done on this as it can’t be just compiled and run in Debian for some reason.
This is basically how the GUI of DN-A will looks like:
This image was taken from Ubuntu 9.04 Netbok Remix, so there is nothing new to you. But in the DN-A, I might change the colour a bit to reddish colours.
I had received some suggestion to use other desktop environment, such as LXDE (suggested by HardyWeb) and the Meego GUI (suggested by Eric Yeoh).
Myself, do thought of using Elightment or Fluxbox as well. But at the end, Fluxbox was taken out from my plan list due to it will be a disaster to those user who don’t know how to use Fluxbox. Yeah, not much people is g33k or 1337 enough to use Fluxbox, although Fluxbox rulez!
Here is an example on how Enlightment might looks like with the ported Ubuntu’s netbook-launcher on Debian.
So far, no decision of using which desktop environment is made yet, so just assume that it might be release with the Ubuntu 9.04’s UNR gnome addon.
And to those who are concern, don’t worry. Stuffs like Unity and other much debated/controversial components will not be ported into DN-A, unless too much people is requesting for it.
Anyway, hopefully I am able to start a website and build up a community for this project so that everyone who interested to take part in the development can have a place for discussion for this distro.
If you interested in having the alpha version to test it, you may come to Debian community booth in any open source events that DebMal(Debian Malaysia) got involve in. Look for me and ask about it, if I got bring along the installer of the DN-A alpha version, I can copy it to your thumbdrive or external hard disk.
Remember, bring your own storage media, I will not burn a CD for you.