2. Goals of x-mario
1. Have a smooth and fun experience
● simple launcher interface with quick access to different categories
and games
● as many games as possible out of the box
● offer localized browser games to feature contributors in the region
● offer games to play on less powerful PCs
● include games for entertainment and education
2. Create a simple and beautiful distro
● make a beautiful distribution with good internationalization support
● make distro for CD, DVD and USB as well as for installations
3. Contribute back
● learn more about Linux, how to build a distribution and contribute to
projects in community
3. Other games distributions
What are other distros? Other game distributions with different goals
and implementations are:
● linux-gamers.net
● supergamer
● Fedora Games Spin
4. Why the name x-mario
x - stands for all contributors to projects and games used in the
distribution
x - also stands for x gamers
mario - is a symbol name associated by many people around the world
with gaming and fun
5. team behind x-mario
● Thanh Nguyen
● Hon Nguyen
● Hong Phuc Dang
● Mario Behling
● Julien Lavergne
● Rafael Laguna (神癒礁湖)
6. x-mario test base system
● first test version is based on Ubuntu 11.10
● includes GNOME components like gtk+
● only games installed
● no application (office, chat, mail, ...).
● does not include Unity
● launcher application based on lxlauncher
7. Why Ubuntu as a base
● Ubuntu is a popular distro with a lot of documentation
● Debian/Ubuntu offer many tools for custom distributions
● Some Ubuntu developers, e.g. Julien Lavergne from lubuntu
helped us to get started
The developers are open to use other distributions as a base for x-
mario, if more suitable.
8. What tools do we use
● Debootstrap: a base tool for debian based distributions
● Ubiquity: to install system on live cd to hard drive
● DPKG dev: tool that helps to install other packages
● Genisoimage: create iso file via command line
● Squashfs-tools: tool to create and append to squashfs filesystems
● UbuntuDevTools: useful tools for bug filing, packaging
preparation, package analysis, etc.
● p7zip: help compress and extract file
9. Building a Distro
● Remastersys - clone your current Debian/Ubuntu install and make
it into a live CD
● SUSE studio - build your distro with this tool from the OpenSuse
community
● Revisor is a tool for Fedora
● or write a build script to create a distro from scratch
10. Building x-mario
● in x-mario we use a build script to create the distribution from
scratch
● in 3 steps you can create the distro
12. Building x-mario: Step 1
chroot+packages
Step 1: Create a chroot and install our packages. The
base packages that must be installed are:
+ ubuntu-standard: depends on all of the packages in the Ubuntu
standard system
+ casper - hook for initramfs-tools to boot live systems
+ lupin-casper - provides hooks to find an ISO image on a hard disk
and to read a preseed file from a hard disk, which are used in the early
part of this process
+ laptop-detect - attempts to determine whether it is being run on a
laptop or a desktop and appraises its caller of this.
+ os-prober - spinoff of debian-installer
+ linux-generic - contains the Linux kernel image
13. Building x-mario: Step 1
chroot+packages
+ GNOME Network Manager
+ X.org - the X Window System
+ dbus-x11 (D-BUS is a message bus system, a simple way for
applications to talk to one another).
+ openbox (Window manager for X Window system).
+ Desktop Environment (Interface packages): We have different
choices e.g.: GNOME, KDE, XFCE, or LXDE
+ After choosing the interface we also need to install depending
packages e.g. session manager, display manager, artwork, icons, ....
14. Building x-mario: compress chroot
Step 2: Compress the chroot system into a file. This step will compress
the system and information about it to filesystem.squashfs
15. Building x-mario: disk image
Step 3: Create and configure the disk image which includes:
● the bootloader (isolinux)
● the kernel
● the compressed file-system image
● all other required components
18. Obstacles to overcome
● If there is a package missing (or a dependent package) in the first
step, the build will not work. It takes time to get it right.
● We want add more games to distro but size of a CD has limit. We
will create a repository and put many games onto this. Users can
then easily install new games. Alternatively, we plan to offer a DVD
version for x-mario.
● Some cool games require Qt and additional libraries contradicting
with the goal of a fast system
● Support different hardware. We need to install some base driver
hardware. This is always tricky.
19. x-mario outlook
● expected release date of first version - August 2012
● future offer repository game "shop"
● best possible hardware support
● contribute to projects x-mario uses
● improve launcher experience
20. Thank you!
www.x-mario.com
Hong Phuc Dang hp@fossasia.org
Hon Nguyen vanhonit@gmail.com
