ThinTao 0.9.0 beta available

Hi all,

Ok, the original Tao TC work has blossomed into 'ThinTao' - which is a
little more general purpose and flexible than the original Tao TC.  For
now, the first iso comes with an installer and 'multiterm' image for
building X terminals and Windows terminals, both with sound support.
(see below for sound on X terminals).  Here's a quick overview of
features:

- ThinTao installer creates a hardware-specific initrd with just the
drivers needed for the hardware.
- The kernel & initrd can be booted from usbkey, cdrom, and network,
with flexible boot & configuration options.
- The initrd loads a hardware-neutral 'image' that determines the
behavior of the box; currently I have the 'multiterm' image, but will
soon be creating a 'router' image. (see docs for more on this)
- Support for i586 & i686

While I'm a big fan of network booting, I've always wanted to boot my
appliances from other media; esp. since I build Linux routers from time
to time.  Just today I booted my 'devel' terminal from cdrom, usbkey and
network.  Note that I do most all of my development with network
booting, so it's still nicely supported.

You can grab the 'beta' from here:
ftp://dist.taolinux.org/pub/tcdevel/thintao-0.9.0.iso

The documentation is still a bit light, but hopefully enough.  Before
long I hope to have more docs on how, exactly, to boot from the various
media with different bootloaders.

Note that if you've got a devel box with a cdrom drive, it shouldn't be
too hard to create an initrd, and use the installer iso as an example to
create a hardware-specific bootable cd.

Also, I forgot to add this bit to the iso:

Note that to get remote esound on an X terminal, you need a 'termsound'
script in /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d:
---
ESPEAKER="${DISPLAY%:*}"
if [ -n "$ESPEAKER" ]
then
        export ESPEAKER
        export ESDDSP_MIXER=1
fi
---

Finally, keep in mind that current ThinTao is based on Tao Linux 1.0, so
uses kernel 2.4 and XFree86 - so it won't support the latest bleeding
edge hardware.  Note, though, that the current design is based on having
looked at RHEL4 beta, and should port fairly quickly to Tao 4 when
available.

One more note - I don't plan on e-mailing 'tao-discuss' or 'tao-i386' in
the future; if you're interested in staying on top of ThinTao, please
subscribe to the Tao-TC list.

regards,
	David

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