Every now and then, the Haiku mailing lists explode with emails about something called the distribution guidelines. The Haiku guys set up a set of guidelines with regards to use of the Haiku trademarks and logos; the "Haiku" name may not be used in the distribution's name, official trademarks and logos must be excluded, but the Haiku icons and artwork may be used. In addition to these cosmetic and trademark issues, the guidelines explain what is needed in order to receive the official "Haiku compatible" logo.
A few weeks ago, Karl vom Dorff announced he had created a Haiku VMware build environment. This VMware image was set up in such a way that it contained all development tools and optional packages, together with Haiku's source files and a 10GB hard disk image in a 125MB file. The 'distribution' did not comply with the distribution guidelines, so changes needed to be made that Karl happily applied. A few details that required digging into the code (the About panel and the boot screen logo) remained.
These changes were harder to make than the others, and hence discussion arose about whether or not this should be made easier for potential distribution makers. While some supported this train of thought, others did not: the distribution guidelines are actually supposed to discourage people from making Haiku distributions (especially in these early stages of development). As Jorge G. Mare put it: "I personally [think] we should not spend any time writing 'Create your Haiku distro' how to, or changing the build system to support creating distros. Otherwise, you would be simply facilitating the 'Linuxification' of Haiku in the form of distro hell."
Somewhere along the way, I must admit I kind of lost track of the whole debate, despite Mail.app's fairly decent threaded display. I believe that at one point there where three differently named threads about basically the same thing running through one another, which happened to be a little too much to take for me. I figured the discussion would be more or less similar to the other discussions the mailing list has seen regarding the distribution guidelines. These discussions are kind of like Seat cars; once you have seen one of them, you have seen them all.
After the whole flurry of emails about this subject bombarding my Haiku mailbox, it got silent for a few days. As it turns out, the guys behind the original VMware image distribution that started it all renamed their distribution to Senryu, while complying to the rest of the guidelines as well - including a wonderfully sarcastic boot screen. Senryu comes in two flavours:
The Developer Edition contains pre-built build tools, Haiku's sources, plus some applications developers may find useful. The image cuts down the need to download gigabytes of data (it's only ~135mb), and saves hours of time figuring out and building an environment by having a pre-built environment that's ready to use immediately - 'it just works'.
The personal edition also contains Haiku's build environment (minus the sources), but has more applications on it that may be of more interest to the end-user. It is meant to demonstrate Haiku's capabilities.
Both images have support for video, audio, network and burning out of the box. We will try to update the User Edition weekly, while the developer edition will be updated less frequently; as needed.
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