AwaOS is an OS for “the rest of us”, people who missed getting on the tech wave of the 90′s and either still don’t use a PC or are struggle along with the one they have. It is designed to remove everything that is not essential to a typical home user in a rural setting to simplify their computing experience so that they can focus on going outside and enjoying the view. It is designed for those who don’t know what “file system” means and don’t really care. It is designed to take all we have learned about usability from modern cell phones and bring that knowledge back to the desktop where it is desperately needed.
AwaOS is a custom install of the latest version of Ubuntu (10.04, aka Lucid Lynx) running the LXDE desktop environment (also known as Lubuntu), a popular distribution of GNU/Linux. As a custom install, AwaOS does not currently provide an installation CD or LiveCD, thus it is not a proper GNU/Linux distribution. Rather it is presented as a process and list of recommended packages and configurations/settings designed to achieve the goals of the project, and is very much a work in progress. As progress is made, configuration files and scripts will be made available, as will custom packages which will primarily be existing Ubuntu packages to which minor tweaks have been applied. Eventually, I would like to provide an installation CD and maintain my custom packages on Launchpad to make AwaOS a GNU/Linux distribution.
Until the distribution is completed and becomes available, the OS will be available to hobbyists by following along with this blog and later the forums or to members of my rural community to whom I give free or near free hardware with it pre-installed.
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