Ark Linux Website Theme and Artwork

[Piki]

Ach, been neglecting to visit here.

I've confirmed Ark back in development. I'm webmaster, beta tester, and soon to be packager for Trinity KDE3 (though we'll still be doing KDE4).

If you guys are still interested in doing some artwork for Ark, I'll include it in the site (referring back to you guys to give you credit), and i'm sure bero would consider it for the ISO.

[Piki]

Wow, being that the last post here was in October, I'm surprised this thread didn't sink past 3rd place

I've been coming by every so often, just haven't seen any topics come up that caught my attention. But I'm still hoping there is still someone willing to do some artwork, maybe even teach me some basics of, say, Krita or GIMP (I'll go post in one of the appropriate forums when I'm ready to get started, working on quite a bit as it is)

I'm going to start  pressuring bero to start releasing more ISOs to test (the last one was September, but we do seem to hear from him about once every one to two months). I'm also going to work on packaging the Trinity KDE3 project. We'll be including both Trinity and KDE4 in the repos and including them in our next release.

We would appreciate it if you guys could do some artwork for some KDE (3 and 4) and site theming as a sort of grand-return-after-three-years sort of thing. It doesn't have to be fancy, our aim is to provide something easy for normal, non-technical user while remain flexible enough for hobbyists, power users, and veterans.

I think it was mentioned in a previous post that Ark prefers a water theme. Some of our users seem to prefer sort of a chaotic storm sort of thing while some prefer a calm, relaxing theme. If anybody is up to the challenge, we can get to discussing some general theme ideas on which to base the artwork, or we can use themes that are already in existence. We at Ark could even do some themee around some artwork.

Anybody willing to pick up the project?

[Dadster]

  I tried to log onto the Ark forum but it was down tonight.   If you settled on desktop art or theme then I could contribute with ark skins for different apps that you're including in the next release.

[Piki]

The forum was down? I'm not having any trouble here... Did it give any kind of error, or was it just not able to reach arklinux.org? I know we seem to be having problems with the download mirrors for some strange reason (first it wouldn't upload, now things are appearing and disappearing at random and only some of the stuff is uploading, and now we seem to be missing most of the mirror), but the mirror isn't linked to the site, they are on separate machines, and I'm able to load the site in firefox and ssh in to the site without any problems. Unfortunately I can't do any research into the problem until later because I'm about to be off to work.

We haven't settled on any themes or art as of yet. For our previous releases using KDE3, we went with the default KDE theme and modified some of the key bindings to make things easier for new users. Unfortunately I am very out of sync with what most other people want from their interface, though based on KDE4, Vista, and 7, I'd say people are leaning toward a more gothic theme. Personally I don't like this, I find it too "dark and depressing", but we can always do several different themes and include them on the ISO along with instructions for changing it.

[Piki]

We have the mirrors back again, and new dockyard-devel ISOs available. They are having some issues (xorg.conf not being generated correctly and the default arklinux and root accounts disabled, so a chroot from a Live CD or another installed distro is required to set passwords and remove the xorg.conf, which (for the most part) isn't necessary, and apparently some machines need to have their initrd images regenerated after doing a "mount -o bind" to bind the live system's proc and sys to the chroot in order to preload the drivers for the hard disk controller); they are installable, though, and I am in the process of setting up a personal build server to get up and running building Trinity KDE (they are currently on 3.5.12 and are planning to release 3.5.13 in April).

If you were getting an error about having too many MySQL connections, that isn't us. There are other F\OSS projects using the same database server as us. They are not in the same database, but after emailing with the support team, they said that the server for one of the other projects has been having some troubles as of late. I'm surprised it's still happening, though -- they were having the same issue a couple weeks ago when I emailed them.

If you want to come over to our forum and discuss this there, go ahead, things seem fine for now. If it comes up with too many MySQL connections (doesn't seem to happen often, but lasts anywhere from a few seconds up to about five minutes), just keep refreshing until it loads. Or you can discuss it in our Live Support under the Support menu on our site (doesn't need to connect to our database after it loads, seems to have some sizing issues though) or by connecting an IRC client to chat.freenode.net or irc.freenode.net channel #arklinux -- both will get you the same place. We also have a mailing list you can discuss it on. The mailing list is probably the best bet -- even though it's mostly for support, I don't think anybody will have any problem with discussing the artwork/theming there, and we can get more ideas for what to do anyway (most of our team is subscribed there, not everyone is on IRC at the same time, and of the three of us that frequent the forum, only one isn't subscribed to the mailing list, but I think I can bully him and the team member that's rarely around to join).