Kawiri

Kawiri is a desktop distribution for notebooks. Its purpose is to become a very lightweight yet feature rich and eye pleasing distro. Kawiri is a derived distribution, it is based on OpenSDEs' Bare Desktop target, albeit it modifies the package selection of its ancestor, removing heavily unneeded packages. Small size is a goal, but more than that speed is what Kawiri is after.

To achieve this Kawiri will go through a carefull design stage, which will consist not only in selecting the propper kernel options, but also selecting applications. We will try to go with the “One app for a job” philosophy, selecting apps that do the job well, are fast and not the last are small in size.

Right now the idea is to have gtk apps mainly, xorg, and metisse as window manager. We will try to keep out the known memory hogs as KDE or Open Office.Org, and any other applications similar, but as size is just a goal we don't want to sacrifice comfort and user friendliness for the sake of it.

Another bold goal of Kawiri is to address the hardware issues that laptop users face today. And if that means introducing binary drivers or applications then so be it. We want to focus on wireless issues, PCCARD, graphic processors and all the other “gadgets” that laptop users are “blessed” with today.

The goals of Kawiri are big, the developer comunity is small yet we feel the need to address all those 'Help my laptop is not working with linux' entries found in various forums. In most of the cases software is there, but either your distro is not careing about that hardware, or the philosophy of the distro ( and read here the LICENSE ) does not allow introduction of pieces of code which are not free. Well, that is not the case with Kawiri our philosophy is make it work, by hook or crook. Last but not least Kawiri is easy on the user. We strive for no config we want stuff that works out of the box, even if you have a Vaio, a ThinkPad, or some other “brand” laptop. Having a branded laptop does not mean that you have to run Windows, or at least it should not mean that, even if your kind provider says so. We don't belive in constraints, if you buy a TV set, do you alow the vendor to dictate the programs that you watch on it? Why should be a laptop different?

We hope that we can make a difference, anyway we will try our best. As a true Kawiri we will be voracious in achieving our goals.

Kawiri is a small carnivorous marsupial native to the dry grasslands and deserts of central Australia. Kawiri is a known to be a voracious predator.

Browse the source at http://git.opensde.net/desktop/kawiri