Happy Second Anniversary Fuduntu!

Happy second anniversary, Fuduntu! Today we celebrate the second anniversary of the Fuduntu Linux distribution, and what a year it has been!

In our second year Fuduntu has undergone many exciting changes in key areas designed to improve platform supportability and growth. Over the course of the year our user base has expanded to exceed 50,000 active users, and our team has groomed many new volunteers who are now working in our support, design, packaging, and development teams.

A significant change for Fuduntu this year was the introduction of a new leadership team, and segregation of roles within different areas of the platform. This allows us to keep focus in all of the respective areas, while not overburdening any one team member. It also eliminates any single point of failure within the project leadership. Currently, our organization consists of 6 individual areas with 7 leaders.

• Project Leader, Andrew Wyatt
• Support, Randy Adams
• Development, Noah Hall
• Packaging, Nick Bryda
• Infrastructure, David Holden
• Communications, Lee Ward
• Marketing, Blair Zimmerman

Each leader is responsible for ensuring the smooth function of each respective area, and also for grooming and on-boarding new volunteers.

Even in our second year, our philosophy of making small incremental improvements hasn’t changed. While we have made major progress in many areas of the desktop experience we have continued to keep our foundation stable while shipping the latest applications and the latest kernel.

Our base platform has seen a vast number of improvements this past year including many that seem small, but play an important role to the stability of our system.

• Quarterly release strategy starting with 2012.1
• Introduction of a mirror network
• Hosting migrations
• Latest stable kernel, currently 3.4 series
• Platform improvements
  • GRUB2
  • Improved TMPFS
  • Bug fixing core packages

Our support team does a fantastic job of helping our userbase. They are friendly, approachable, and professional. I personally can’t thank them enough for the work that they do to help our users.

Layered on top of our base platform, is our beautiful core desktop featuring GNOME 2. Yes, we still ship and support GNOME 2!

Our base desktop couldn’t be more beautiful either! Over the course of the year we have made vast improvements to the default desktop shipped with Fuduntu.

• Design and integration of a new base theme based on Equinox
• Improvements to our icon pack based on Faenza
• Integration of Google’s Droid fonts
• Plus we are shipping some of the most beautiful creative commons licensed wallpapers available

In addition to beautification of our distribution, we have continued working on the GNOME 2 product fixing bugs and making other improvements as necessary. We have also created Elmer, a simple tool that provides quick access to support, documentation, and the community.

Our development team has done an exceptional job this year fixing bugs and developing new software for our distribution. One thing that sets us apart at Fuduntu is that our developers are very close to our end users, often interacting with them directly.

On top of our stable base platform and beautiful desktop are our apps. This year we have improved our defaults, eliminating some of the web focused applications from the base installation while keeping them available in our repository for those users that prefer them.

Our philosophy dictates that we ship the latest stable applications whenever possible. Our packaging team has done an admirable job of keeping up with the latest application releases often releasing them to testing within 48 hours of release upstream.

We are currently shipping the latest stable versions of many applications including but not limited to LibreOffice, Chromium, Firefox, and Thunderbird.

A big challenge this year has been keeping up with growth. Based on our relatively slow growth pattern over our first year, we weren’t prepared for the explosive growth that came with the release of 2012.1. In order to support this unplanned growth we quickly improved our project hosting and created a simple method to grow and support a mirror network.

We have been very fortunate to have been able to establish mirrors with providers all over the globe. I would like to personally thank the following providers for donating hosting to Fuduntu:

• AARNet, Australia
• LayerJet, Germany
• HEAnet, Ireland
• ASAHI Net, Japan
• Swedish FOSS online, Sweden
• Tamkang University, Taiwan
• GigeNET, USA
• Indiana University, USA
• SourceForge, USA
• pair Networks, USA

Overall, this has been our best year yet in terms of platform growth and community. As we look forward to 2013, I believe we have a strong future ahead.

Fuduntu Website – Fuduntu.org
Fuduntu Community – Fuduntu Forum
Distrowatch – Fuduntu
IRC: #fuduntu @ Freenode

Download: 2012.4 – 32Bit: [ Download | Torrent ] 64Bit: [ Download | Torrent ]

SHA1 Sums:

32 bit: a1a611daebf36cb80b2aa009b4db9756da787ea1
64 bit: 70cae992945b005faef0b1dc5ba770b4a2dadd1d