Personal Project: Debian Office

[12halea]

I am working on a project for my High school Senior Project and I have a few questions.
I am basing my Distribution off of Debian as the title says and my goal is lightweight.

What was your original goal with Ubuntu Linux?

Where did you start when developing Debian into Ubuntu?

What major problems did you have to deal with when creating Ubuntu?

How long did it take to get Ubuntu into a working release version?

What programs would you use in an office environment (office suite will be libre office, I am wondering about other programs)

I plan on making this distribution light enough to run on as little as 256Mb of RAM, do you have any advice on doing this?

How would you deal with any driver issues?

What would you do about security issues?

Many companies use domain log-ins, This hasn't/doesn’t work well with Linux, do you have any advice about how to solve this problem?

Do you see a good future in Linux distributions for a general replacement for windows and/or OSX?



If this is the wrong place please let me know ASAP.
Thank You.

[BBQdave]

I am working on a project for my High school Senior Project and I have a few questions.
I am basing my Distribution off of Debian as the title says and my goal is lightweight.

I plan on making this distribution light enough to run on as little as 256Mb of RAM, do you have any advice on doing this?

Short answer: Debian6

Meets your system requirements and updates (and bug fixes) are available quickly.

Explore Debian6 (with default desktop of Gnome 2.3) and I believe you will find it meets all your needs. And you can add other applications through Software Center and/or Synaptic Package Manager.

I would also offer that GNU/Linux is a community. Any distro you can contribute to and receive support on. And you have the freedom to customize the distro to meet your needs (hence, your project, Debian Office).

[drawkcab]

Why not build on Crunchbang?

[mips]

Why not build on Crunchbang?

Why, it's essentially Debian 6 with preconfigured config files and themes?

[malspa]

If this is the wrong place please let me know ASAP.

Shouldn't these questions be directed towards the Ubuntu devs?

[12halea]

Shouldn't these questions be directed towards the Ubuntu devs?

that was the plan
and I have a potential build on crunchbang
It uses ~70Mb of ram on boot and I need to reduce this if possible
all themes are less than 1 MB in size just need to go through and find/kill any stray files to cut down the ISO size
Also
anyone got any links for a way to make it into a bootable install image?

[BrokenKingpin]

I plan on making this distribution light enough to run on as little as 256Mb of RAM, do you have any advice on doing this?

There are already 50 distros that do this, so I don't really see the point... ChrunchBang for example.

It's fine if you are just doing it for a school project, but there really is no need for another light distro.

[12halea]

There are already 50 distros that do this, so I don't really see the point... ChrunchBang for example.

It's fine if you are just doing it for a school project, but there really is no need for another light distro.

I have the feeling you did not even read and comprehend my post
I am making a office distribution, that is also lightweight.
I know there are lightweight distros, but that isn't my primary goal.
Also, thanks everyone for your opinions.

[Glenn nl]

Debian + Fluxbox + Pcmanfm + galculator + leafpad + gpicview + Abiword + Gnumeric + epdfview + sylpheed + Midori = a good start.

[krapp]

I have the feeling you did not even read and comprehend my post
I am making a office distribution, that is also lightweight.
I know there are lightweight distros, but that isn't my primary goal.
Also, thanks everyone for your opinions.

Writing a script to download what components you deem important on top of a minimal Debian install should provide you with what you're after.