Introducing The Dave/Dina Multimedia Distro

thomasvs writes "The Dave/Dina project is a small enthusiastic group of developers working on a complete open-sourced distribution for home entertainment systems. You can record and watch TV, watch DVD's, grab and listen to CD's, rate your music, videochat with other people, watch pictures, and all this on your TV set in the living room, with a remote control. The first .iso set has just been released. This is a beta release meant to attract new developers, testers, and hackers, who want to work towards a similar goal. It works fine for us, but it might need fixing on other hardware, which is our next goal. On a related note, Happy New Year to everyone !"

Yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Rate your music" is a particularly stupid reason for media PC.

If I have the song, THAT's the good rating. The fact that I went out & got it. What kind of moron goes out to get music they don't like?

I really think..

[NanoGator]

... that highly specialized distros of Linux like these are going to be what gets it into households. Bonus points of they make it CD bootable like Knoppix.

Man I'd love to have a mail server distro. Just run the install, then get a little wizard thing that asks the questions it needs to know to be configured, then boom, you have a mail server.

Make another for web server, office workstation, game distro, artist distro, PDA distro, etc. If focus is given to suit these needs, people will be less shy about trying them out. I know I would be. It's rather daunting to set up Linux, then have NFI what you want to do next, then when you do get an idea it's a PITA to find out what you need to do it.

Re:Everyone can do all of this already, duh

[dom1234]

Of course we can install all this software ourselves. But my mother can't.
The reason for using any Linux distribution is to have a maximum of useful and well configured software with minimum efforts.

My Red Hat 9, before I had done manual installations of many extra software or newer or different versions, couldn't play neither mp3s, mpgs, avis, nor movs.

We can do all this with any distribution just like we can program a complete database system in assembler, or we can have a perfectly secure network if we don't let default settings on OSes, etc.

Being able to do something is one thing, but being able to do this easily is another one.

Re:I really think..

[earthforce_1]

Actually, I would rather see one universal distro that could become whatever you want it to be - anything from a single floppy firewall that runs on a 386, to an everything but the kitchen sink super desktop system, or perhaps one element of a beowulf cluster.

That is the way the kernel itself is designed - it can be cut down slim and trim or loaded up with all the fixin's. But it is all built off the same code base.

1000 specialized distros will lead to confusion in the marketplace, and would be a nightmare to keep up to date. Imagine if you have even 10 of them to take care of, and had to remember a few months later how to reinstall or patch if the tools and package management are different for each!

Re:freevo, movix, mythtv, geexbox

[ScrewMaster]

Yes, we do, until one of them gets it right.

Evolution in action.

Re:davedina.org requesting $20,000

[evilviper]

Haven't you learned anything on slashdot? Stick them on P2P, and let everyone else share the load.

It seems that bittorrent is currently /. prefered (but probably only because it's new and trendy). I much prefer smarter P2P (like Gnutella).

BTW, be prepared to be inundated with thousands of requests by people, asking you to upload them to each of their desktops :-)