OK, I know I've been quiet for a while, but this doesn't necessary mean nothing really happened :).

Truth is that I've been busy with some other projects and regarding NimbleX nothing major appeared to make a big difference for the users. I did a lot of testing and new things haven't performed well enough to worth updating.

NimbleX 2010 is still not close to be complete but today I think a pretty big breakthrough just happened.

So enough talk and let me tell you what we have now:

• brand new kernel
• most CLI things updated
• new XServer
• KDE4

We finally have a brand new foundation, new kernel (2.6.33) with squashfs4 and aufs2. This was actually the hardest part. Long story short aufs2 used to crash a lot (seems OK now :D) and squashfs4 with lzma support was supposed to be accepted for a while in the kernel and it just got resent to the drawing board again for reasons that I understand but which are not important to NimbleX. Anyway, we have a working kernel and don't have to wait months again for that to happen :)

Most of the command line stuff was updated so this should be good :) Here the only annoying thing I can remember is a stupid change in udev but we'll not use the very latest and it should be fine.

XServer was also updated and all the new stuff that comes with it (drivers, tools, etc). The new XServer should be a lot better but we'll see how it will actually perform on the stuff you have.

New libs were added. Actually my goal is to add many new libs, even if they are unnecessary at first sight because it will allow you to use additional software while taking less time hunting for libs.

NEW KDE! KDE 4.3.5 will probably be the desktop environment for NimbleX 2010. It's crazy slow compared to KDE3 but it seems way better than KDE 4.1 and I think in the long term it's benefits will start to show. I currently see a lot of potential in it because the truth is that it has some features that are really nice :)

Now regarding what's left to do the short answer is... A LOT. Some of the things that come to mind now:

• Make boot time acceptable. Now it takes ages (more than 2 minutes) to boot into KDE. This is a bit scary actually because KDE4 on it's own takes more to load than what it took NimbleX 2008 from bootloder to everything loaded.
• Find the right software mix that would allow most users do as much as possible.
• Add the libs applications might ask for. There are many libs out there so it will take a while to figure out which worth being standard.
• Tuning, testing, tuning, testing until it feels right.

One more thing before calling it a day. NimbleX 2010 will not be 200MB anymore. It's can't be kept to 200MB because of KDE4 and because I think it's better to get more libs with the distro for making it less of a hassle when new software is added. Maybe it will be 300MB, maybe it will be 400MB, I just don't know at this stage. Maybe we'll even have more versions. I guess we'll have to wait and see.