Francesco Arillotta/Underground Desktop

Can you tell us about yourself and what your goals are with Underground Desktop Linux???

I am a 33 years old guy and I'm a student in Informatics.

I started Underground Desktop as a hobby,

one year ago (and it still is). I didn't manage to find a distro I

like among debian based ones (Ubuntu wasn't yet released), and was a Linux user for a quite long time, so I decided to give myself a chance, also because I tend to avoid using rpm based distributions. The original idea was similar to that of Ubuntu, i.e. adapting the upcoming sarge installer to fit my needs. Underground 006 to 008 followed that idea, but then I found anaconda for debian and liked the idea of a graphical installer for debian, so I began playing with it, until I came to Underground 010/011. Another need I wanted to satisfy was that of a quite fast distro, so I compile an optimized version of KDE and use that as a desktop. Also, I compile patched desktop-optimized kernel versions to merge them in Underground. Finally, I try to find a look and feel which personally satisfies my aesthetic tastes. What made you come up with this distro??? - What features does this distro have that other debian distros don't ??? I don't know exactly, but I try to configure the system to be as easy to use as possible. The goal is to provide an out of the box working environment for most common needs, and for "linux-unaware" users. How is your usb drive mounting compared to the like of Kubuntu; by this i mean i get stalls a lot when using my usb drive and at times it has to be one during boot up in order to work right. Maybe it's a bug, please post in the forum something more specific, and/or email to me about this issue. Have you done any testing with nvidia and ati drivers and games??? Yes, nvidia drivers are reported to work ok by most people (use the original ones from their site not the debian packages). I tested Tuxracer and it runs much faster than without nvidia drivers. What would you like to improve in the world of Linux??? - Does this support all current debian software or do you use your own sources to upgrade ??? I don't know yet how to handle upgrades decently, the distro is not in a stable state anyway. I think upgrades are a problem on gnu/linux based systems. Apt-get shouldn't be used to upgrade the whole system (dist-upgrade) but only individual packages.

Whats the min spec for a system running your distro???

The distro has been reported to run fast on pentium III 700 Mhz cpus. I think 128 MB of RAM should be enough for running the desktop environment, but of course the much the better. A supported graphic card is needed by anaconda, a Vesa compliant card should work ok. Can you run plone,siteman,PHPnuke etc with Little to low problems with your distro??? The distribution has not a particular focus on security until now, so it's not intended for server installations. Test installations for local use should be ok. While viruses in Linux do exist alot of Linux distros do not come with anti virus support will you add it to your distro ???? Probably no, maybe antispam. Have you approached Transgamming in order to get a leg up on gaming under your distro??? No. But maybe it's not a bad idea to preinstall Wine, I will think about it. If not why not??? - What do you feel is the best feature of your distro??? The fact I like it :-)