An important aspect of designing any brand or logo is knowing the culture they would be representing. As such, in this short article, I will take a moment to review the personalities that define Unity-Linux. As I love etymology, let’s start with the literal definitions of Unity and Linux.

u·ni·ty n (from FreeDictionary.com)

1. The state or quality of being one; singleness.
2. The state or quality of being in accord; harmony.
3. a. The combination or arrangement of parts into a whole; unification. b. A combination or union thus formed.
4. Singleness or constancy of purpose or action; continuity: “In an army you need unity of purpose” (Emmeline Pankhurst).
5. a. An ordering of all elements in a work of art or literature so that each contributes to a unified aesthetic effect. b. The effect thus produced.
6. Mathematics – a. The number 1.

Linux (from Webopedia)

A freely-distributable open source operating system that runs on a number of hardware platforms. The Linux kernel was developed mainly by Linus Torvalds and it is based on Unix. Because it’s free, and because it runs on many platforms, including PCs and Macintoshes, Linux has become an extremely popular alternative to proprietary operating systems.

However, these, at least, do not inspire me on the culture of Unity-Linux. Indeed, a number of our Graphic Team members have voiced how difficult it is to base branding or logo design on these because of how ubiquitous and saturated they are. Unity is everywhere and has practically been a theme in cultural symbology since humanity became sentient enough to work together for common goals. A quick search on Google emphasizes this. Symbols of Unity are everywhere: the flag, circles, or just about any grouping of three items. Further investigation reveals they have all been used in corporate design. Even the Ubuntu logo is, itself, a symbol of Unity.

I feel the most we can derive from the definitions are basic pieces of inspiration. Next, we should look at what Unity-Linux is. Some keywords are often used by the development team that should help illuminate this, and have even inspired some members of the Graphics Team:

• Core, Branch, Node
• Seed, Sprout, Tree, Branch, Leaf
• Remaster, Re-Spin
• Parent, Child, Sibling, Family, Community

Also worthy of note: Unity is Many-to-One in nature, however, Linux has an inherent nature of One-to-Many. Unity-Linux inherits both of these aspects. It is One Core to be used by Many Branches, but the Many Branches will contribute to improving the One Core.

Keep these in mind for our Graphic Teams next phase of Logo design, where we’ll be hosting a public submission process of Rough Drafts. Of course, we’ll go into more details on that later.

I had been tweeting more than blogging these days. But anyway, I had been publishing what I want to say quite regularly.

Frustrated of getting tonnes of spam on the Granular Package Archive everyday, I finally fixed the issue today, once and for all. This had been a long time pending task. I did this by integrating reCaptcha.

Saw Toy Story last week. Loved it! My favorite dialog? – “To infinity and beyond”.

India’s Cricket tour of West Indies starts just three days from now.

I am missing Granular development a lot; hopefully I’ll be able to continue development within a week or so. Meanwhile, the artwork team (Granuminati) had been doing some great stuff.

Still reading The Fountainhead (by Ayn Rand) since months now. I am a sloooow reader when it comes to philosophy novels. Anyway, I have started with the part 3 of novel based on Gail Wynand.

Finally did the dreaded Drupal update for granularproject.org.

Power cuts here, in Punjab, are getting worse day-by-day. 7 hour cuts are a norm these days.

We get a lot of requests to know what’s been going on with Unity Linux lately. We haven’t been static, so let’s talk a bit about what we’ve been up to:

Unity Linux Bug/Issue Tracker

(URL To be announced)

We’ve been configuring workflows in our bugtracker for the past few weeks. It’s important that we make sure things flow correctly before we open them up for public consumption so that a bug/issue can take the correct escalation and repair path when being fixed.

For most of us, this is a new endeavor, as our previous distros may not have used a bug tracker. Just before our first public alpha, the bug tracker will go live.  We’ll post more on this soon.

We Have an Open Developers List

http://groups.google.com/group/ul-developers

Since Unity will be the core platform on which other distributions build, it makes sense that a developers mailing list should be setup for anyone wanting to get involved with Unity or derivative distributions.

Do you have plans for releasing your own distro based on Unity? If so, this mailing list is for you. All of our Unity Core developers are members so you’ll have their ear!

Updated to RPM 5

http://rpm5.org

We’ve been considering moving away from RPM 4.x ever since the beginning of Unity. The pros and cons were weighed and many developers debated back and forth on the subject. The decision was made to go to RPM 5 (you can see how they came to this conclusion here, and voted here).

This is a fundamental shift because many of us have PCLinuxOS roots, and PCLinuxOS has been RPM 4.x for many years. RPM5 brings new dependency resolution, speed enhancements, and a myriad of other features that the developers feel will propel Unity into the future with added efficiency and vigor.

In the near future, more will be written on why we chose RPM5.

The Smart Package Manager

http://labix.org/smart

Most of you have heard that we’ve switched away from Apt4RPM in order to embrace the Smart Package Manager. We gain speed improvements with Smart over Synaptic. Smart also allows derivative distributions to use channel priorities. This means that distributions can select to have their repository packages take precedent over other repositories. That in itself isn’t news, but there are unlimited priorities they can set. This allows them to pull from many different repositories and using the priority ranking, make sure nothing important is overwritten on their Unity Core during updates.

If you’d like to see more features that Smart brings to the table, please check here: http://labix.org/smart/features

SVN Has Migrated

http://svn.unity-linux.org (RSS)

We’ve moved SVN from sourceforge to our own SVN. We had to do this because of space requirements.

You can view what we’ve been up to on SVN by visiting our WebSVN site.

MkliveCD Project

URL to be announced

We’ve taken over most of the development for the Mklivecd project. We’re making updates to it that will allow the use of Splashy and tweaking the outdated detection scripts.

We’re also working on getting MkliveCD to play nice with the 2.6.29+ kernels. If this is feasible, we’ll take over the mklivecd project and contribute our alterations. If it isn’t, we may have to look toward alternatives.