Although I will be sad when this user forum is frozen, I think it had to happen sooner or later. Almost all the activity has been taking place under the "Pardus Anka" section, and now that Anka has officially changed its name to PiSi Linux ...

I'll wait patiently for the final, street-ready release of PiSi Linux and try it on a spare partition. If it runs well on my hardware, I will probably install it permanently. It sounds like the development team is fairly small at this point, but I trust that they are working as carefully as they can.

Along with richdb, I encourage everyone who still has an interest in Pardus / Anka / PiSi Linux to register for the new forum:

http://forum.pisilinuxworld.org/index.php

Hi, TicoLinux,

Yes, I still have Kaya installed and am using it right now. I have not had time to test everything, but I'm pleasantly surprised at how much of the system is working fine.

There are still rough edges to fix, though ... For example, I just tried to use Texmaker (a LaTeX editor) for the first time. The program itself opens OK, but when I try to open a .tex file with Texmaker (via its File > Open menu), a very strange-looking window opens:



Uploaded with ImageShack.us

It's late, so I'll have to wait until tomorrow to see if I can figure out why this is happening ... (It's curious that if I use Geany to open a file [via its File > Open menu), everything is fine; all of the icon names / file names appear correctly).

Thank you again for taking the time to write about Kaya Xfce. If I hadn't read your blog article, I wouldn't have made the effort to install Kaya myself.

As an experiment, I’ve installed the Anka “Kaya” Xfce 0.1 to a spare partition of my HD. It has worked smoothly on my hardware thus far, so I thought I’d expand on the information already provided by TicoLinux on Yoyo’s Pardus Life blog ... For those who haven’t abandoned Pardus / Anka and who are Xfce fans, you might be interested in trying out this version.

http://parduslife.wordpress.com/2012/09/09/pardus-anka-kaya-0-1-test/
TicoLinux. “Pardus Anka Kaya 0.1 Test.” 9 Sept. 2012

Summary

Kaya (‘rock’ or ‘stone’ in English); the “0.1“ numbering is in honor of the first official version of Pardus, 1.0, released in 2005 and based on Gentoo.

The .iso is an installation CD only (approx. 680 MB) -- there is currently no Live CD version.

64-bit version only, Linux kernel 3.2.5, Xfce 4.10, Chromium 17.0.963.33 (default browser), GRUB Legacy

This is a test (unstable) version which is not recommended for use in a production environment. (However, despite a few minor glitches, it has peformed well on my HD partition during the past 1.5 days).

Possible Installation Glitch with Nvidia GPUs

Note: Those with certain models of Nvidia graphic cards may need to use a cheatcode in order to get the Install CD to load / display properly. (In my case, “xorg=safe” did the trick).

Additional suggestions can be found in this forum thread:

http://worldforum.pardus-linux.nl/index.php?topic=3582.0
“2011 Won’t Install.” 24 Jan. 2011.

Selecting the Repository

It has the TUBITAK repository enabled by default, so it would be a good idea to add the Anka repo and disable the TUBITAK repo (following the instructions below).

http://worldforum.pardus-linux.nl/index.php?topic=4366.0
richdb. “Test the Anka repository.” 27 May 2012.

(I did not uninstall the three virtualbox-related packages before beginning, and I had no problems with updating the system or installing packages from the Terminal).

If you need a refresher on using PiSi from the command line, you can look at the Wiki:

http://en.pardus-wiki.org/Pisi_CLI_Usage
“PiSi CLI Usage.”

It is possible to install the GUI version of PiSi (package-manager), but be aware that it will pull in a large number of KDE-related dependencies.

Available Programs

A sample listing of Xfce-compatible programs which can be installed from the Anka 64-bit repo. (Programs with a strikethrough are not available in the repository):

Accessories:

Leafpad 0.8.18.1
Mousepad
SpeedCrunch calculator 0.10.1
Emacs 23.3.1

Development:

Geany 0.20

Graphics:

GIMP 2.7.3
mtPaint
Ristretto Image Viewer 0.6.0 (You will also need to install tumbler)
Evince 2.32.0 (Caution: This pulls in texlive-bin [12 MB] as a dependency)
Xsane 0.998

Internet:

Firefox 12.0
Midori
Filezilla 3.5.2
gFTP 2.0.19
Deluge 1.3.3
Transmission 2.42
Sylpheed
Thunderbird
Gigolo

Office:

AbiWord 2.9.1
LibreOffice 3.4.3  [122 MB download]
ePDFViewer 0.1.8
Xpdf
Orage 4.8.3
Osmo 0.2.8
Gnumeric
Gnucash

Multimedia:

VLC 1.1.12
Parole
Exaile 0.3.2.1
SMPlayer 0.8.0
flashplugin
Xfburn
Asunder
Quod Libet

Fonts:

Arkpandora
Charis
Doulos
Gentium
Inconsolata
Libertine

Miscellaneous Issues

One of the extra Xfce plugins I installed (I didn’t make a note of which one) pulled in a strange dependency of texlive-core, which drastically increased the download size to over 100 MB.

Here is a screenshot of my Kaya Xfce 0.1 desktop (with the Anka “Turkalin" wallpaper):



The Anka wallpapers can be downloaded here:

http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/Pardus+Anka+%2B+Turkalin+Wallpaper?content=152495

http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/Pardus+Anka+%2B+Ankalin+Wallpaper?content=152496

Thanks to TicoLinux for being the guinea pig who tested this .iso   and wrote about it.

Hi, Anglo,

You might want to check out these fonts:

http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=Gentium_download
Gentium
(Award-winning font designed by Victor Gaultney)

http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=CharisSIL_download
Charis
(Similar to Bitstream Charter)

http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=DoulosSIL_download
Doulos
(Similar to Times/Times New Roman)

http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=Andika_download
Andika
(Reminds me of Comic Sans)

I think all -- or most -- of these are available in the Pardus (2011) repos. I'm not sure about openSUSE, though ... I confess that I'm hardly using Pardus these days; I still have it installed, but am waiting to see what happens with Anka.

Hi, greywalk,

This is just an idea/suggestion (and you may have thought of it already) ... Have you tried contacting SIL for possible assistance? Since they are involved with linguistic computing (such as fonts, keyboard layouts, etc.) and since it seems like some scholars consider Gagauz to be endangered, this might be right up SIL's alley:

http://www.sil.org/sil/contact.html

I'd never heard of Gagauz before, so I found it interesting to do a little research. It's curious that both Wikipedia and Omniglot mention its Latin alphabet, while Ethnologue lists only the Cyrillic alphabet:

http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=gag

I'm sorry I can't be of any help with creating a working keyboard layout. I've done some reading but this is clearly over my head. It does strike me that it might be most logical to use a Turkish keyboard layout as a base, since the alphabet seems identical to Turkish, with the exception of the Romanian " ,t" [ts].

HTH and Good luck,
=david

Many of us know Yoyo Fernandez, a very active and dedicated Pardus user from Spain. In particular, he has done a lot to promote Pardus in the Spanish-speaking community, with his "Pardus Life" blog and a Spanish-language user forum (Foro Pardus-es).

On 12 July 2012, he announced that he is leaving Pardus (although he left his best wishes for the success of the Anka Project) and will likely need to shut down the Pardus Life blog unless someone volunteers to take it over. His announcement was published here:

http://tinyurl.com/73htavx

For those who don't read Spanish, I've extracted a few snippets from his article and will include a translation:


I've reached my limit and don't have the energy to single-handedly continue
with this. I'm aware that if I abandon this [blog], it might die, so I'm leaving
the door open in case anyone else would like to continue the Pardus Life project.


Due to Pardus's downfall (decline) and after some time during which I was still
publishing here on Pardus and KDE, I've gone back to using Gnome, which I always
considered as my "home" desktop environment. I've returned to my .deb-based distros,
Debian and SolusOS, and to be honest I don't plan to continue with KDE.


I would also like to notify you that the domain http://parduslife.com/ is about to
expire and I will not be renewing it, so this blog will go back to using a subdomain
with Wordpress: http://parduslife.wordpress.com/


Well, I don't wish to write at length, [so] if there is someone who still plans to
use Pardus and would like to collaborate on this blog or the [Spanish-language] forum
[Foro Pardus-es], please leave a comment and we will discuss the possibility of adding
him/her as a blog author, so that the blog might continue being published. 

I'd like to publicly thank Yoyo for everything he has contributed to Pardus, and for so freely sharing his Pardus knowledge and expertise. Yoyo, we will miss you.

I wish you the best of luck in your Linux travels.

I would also like to point out that the name "Phoenix" is problematic. I've done some searching and found these instances of "prior use":

http://tinyurl.com/829zra4
Phoenix (aka)
PCLinuxOS Phoenix (aka)
PCLinuxOS Phoenix Edition
[Is a community "spin" developed by Sproggy [Kori] with the Xfce desktop environment.
He has since moved on to develop Phinx: http://tinyurl.com/cc3oraz ]


----- Inactive [?] -----

http://lwn.net/Articles/397669/
T2 SDE, ver. 8.0 "Phoenix"
[28 July 2010]

http://tinyurl.com/d7y4pyr
Phoenix
(Developed by Roger Thorpe and Carlos Laborde)
[last active in 2009 (?)]

http://linux.techass.com/projects/phoenix/
Phoenix Project
[webpage last updated in 2002]

At the moment, I don't have a suggestion for a better name, but I think "Phoenix" should be avoided.

Murat,

Thank you very much for keeping us updated. 


"Anka" is an interesting choice of name. I didn't know that Simurgh is a benevolent flying creature in Persian mythology:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simurg

The workshop date should be March 23-24, right? (I think you made a small typo).

atolboo,
As always, a big thanks to you and everyone from Pardususer.de who is helping create these updated packages! We appreciate your hard work and dedication.

I have been following this discussion with great interest, to see what would happen with Pardus and TUBITAK. Unfortunately, as richdb points out, the situation appears to have gone from bad to worse.

I have carefully read all the information and links which have been posted here in our English-language forum -- and tried to remain hopeful. IMHO, the most damaging / discouraging news is the lengthy message written by Bahadir Kandemir ( http://tinyurl.com/74hural ), a Pardus developer who resigned and actually provides firsthand evidence of the situation inside TUBITAK. Another "insider's" report, clearly written from the heart, was posted by Ozan Caglayan on his blog: http://developer.pardus.org.tr/people/ozan/blog/?p=144. (It was translated into English by Yasin Aydin).

I have been using Pardus since 2009 and it is one of my two "go-to" distros. Solid, reliable, with many nice touches, for me it lived up to someone's claim that Pardus was one of the best (if not the best) implementation of KDE 4 in the Linux ecosystem. So although it is difficult for me to admit it, it seems almost certain that Pardus is dying.  :'(

It seems inevitable that Pardus will have to be forked if the community wishes for the developers' hard work to live on ... I, for one, am certainly willing to use a new fork (if it materializes) and I applaud the efforts of everyone who is volunteering to be a part of it: atolboo, richdb, acjohnson, tribunal, sw (with apologies to others I may have forgotten to mention). I am a simple end-user without programming skills or any in-depth Linux knowledge, but I would certainly be willing to test a new version on a spare partition of my hard drive and report bugs, problems, etc.  

From a logistics viewpoint, one big problem will be the language barrier (which we have experienced before). From the IRC session which acjohnson provided, you can see that some participants were frustrated with being unable to communicate in a common language. I hope there is some way that the efforts of the Turkish-speaking community can be better coordinated with the English-speaking and German-speaking users. (I am not trying to be negative -- just realistic).  

I have not completely abandoned ship yet (I am writing this from my Pardus 2011.2 installation). I will stick around and see what happens.

Thanks again to everyone who uses and supports Pardus -- or a new fork of it, despite TUBITAK's current organizational problems.

@Anglo,

In case you haven't heard about Jeroen Diederen's Linux MintPPC, I thought I'd mention it:

http://mintppc.org/about

We have an old G4 PowerBook (with OS X 10.4 Tiger on it, which is now unsupported). I've read positive reviews of MintPPC and am seriously considering installing it on the laptop.

Hi, Bekir and armut,

Many thanks to both of you for providing us with timely, accurate translations.  I have been trying to follow the news about Pardus' future, but the language barrier has frustrated me.

Pardus is one of my favorite distros and I would be very sorry if the project ended. It sounds like the situation is not as dire as I had first imagined, and that we can hope for a bright future ...

Happy New Year 2012 to you and all the forum members here!

=david

 

Hi, John A,

Thanks for finding this (disturbing  ) news. I had not heard anything about this; I was only aware that it has been a while since I have received any updates for Pardus 2011 -- which is not unusual, based on my previous experience with Pardus 2009 ...

It seems that the Pardus Team has recently lost three developers (according to Erkan Tekman's blog). I'm sure that this was a blow to them. However, I would like to think positively and echo Ozan Caglayan's statement:


It took me some time to follow the various threads of this discussion, and to paste them into Google Translate to see if I could make sense of its translation. For those of us who cannot read Turkish, we know firsthand that Turkish morphology and syntax does not lend itself to graceful machine translations ...

For those interested in reading Google Translate's English rendering of these threads, I will provide links below. It is not my intent to stir up any controversy by doing this; I simply hope that it will save someone's time. I appreciate Pardus, admire what the project has accomplished and wish it continued success.

http://tinyurl.com/7q7xmqg
From Pravda Pardus
(Erkan Tekman's blog)

"Personnel Actions." 2 Nov. 2011.

----------

http://tinyurl.com/87zmowp

"Is the end nearing?" 20 Dec. 2011.

----------

http://tinyurl.com/75kljma
[Pardus-users mailing list]

"What is going on in the Pardus team?" 21 Dec. 2011.

Hallo, Andreas,

It's very nice to see you back in the forum. Welcome again! 

I am still happily using Pardus 2011 on my desktop PC (along with three other Linux distros), and have installed it on an HP Mini 210 netbook. I've been very busy with work-related obligations and have not had much time to post here. When things settle down, I hope to become a more active forum participant.

Merry Christmas (and Happy New Year)!

=david

Hi, pagenoare,

Many thanks for that link! The website has some very creative artwork, and I enjoyed browsing through it. I found several wallpapers to download.