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Anime + FreeBSD = LainOS
Chris Gilbert writes: "This Thursday, a new *BSD OS project went online which is entitled 'LainOS.' LainOS is for the most part a heavily recoded version of FreeBSD 4.5 made to eventually resemble Lain's Navi from the anime 'Serial Experiments Lain.' It sports an animated splash screen, a more fully integrated X server, and a custom graphical login interface, amoung several other improvments over FreeBSD and Linux. You can check the homepage out at http://www.lainos.org ."
This is probably the most doomed pipe-dream OS I've ever seen.
First of all, their screenshot is a picture of gnome with an ugly color scheme and lots of stolen anime graphics.
Second, their website is uuugggggly. To make anyone care about a "cool" OS (or even window manager theme, if that's what they're actually doing), they're going to need it to look good, and that means having a graphic artist.
Third, anime.
Goooood luck...
It's just a sawfish theme.
That's what I gathered from deciphering the "LainOS" website. But they claim, "LainOS is for the most part a modfified version of FreeBSD 4.5," and, "It sports a animated splash screen, a more fully intergrated X server, and a custom graphical login interface, amoung several other improvments over FreeBSD and Linux."
Either they don't know what they're talking about (a theme is not an OS, as you pointed out) or their goal is to roll their own *BSD distribution. Which is it? Themes are great, but that's not much of a vision for a distro. Does *BSD need another distro anyway? I think FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD fit nicely in their own niches. About the only distro I'd like to see would be a fork off OpenBSD to harden security, much like what the NSA did with SE-Linux. OpenBSD is great, but could benefit from a little more paranoia.
Give them an inch and they'll take a foot. Much more than that, you won't have a leg to stand on.
The first kernel "hacker" to use Gedit
I have a sudden urge to laaaaaaaaaauuuuuuuuuuuugh AAHAHAHA.
I was surprised to find that there were indeed differences between the current LainOS and the current FreeBSD distribution. My surprise was short-lived however, as I found that the reason for the differences were that they had stopped applying patches! Many exploits discovered in 4.4 and 4.3 still haven't been patched!
Apart from this, the only difference is the addition of a few ports of anime graphics, Sawfish as the default window manager, and a bunch of packages REMOVED. There's no apache or ssh, and telnet-ssl is broken. It's IMPOSSIBLE to make a secure Lain system!
If you really want in on this, get FreeBSD 4.5, get their few ports of copyright-violation anime bitmaps, and for god's sakes -- DON'T TOUCH the rest!
I'm afraid of burning my karma by speaking out against what -sounds- like a neat project, so I'm posting this anonymously. :/