In writing, it’s zuihitsu.  In surfing it’s “walking the wiki”.

As it is in much of my life, a chain of things leads me along a path.  This was true for Unity Linux.  I probably would have eventually found Unity Linux in some other way, but here is the odd way in which I did:

• Google Sites – I have some stuff I wanted to put up online, and so I had signed up to Google Sites to see what it was like.
• Google Sites Support – Disappointed with Google Sites, I went looking through their Support section.
• Google Knol – One of their support pages had a mention of wiki-editing their help files.  This lead to Google Knol.
• I signed up to, and re-published an article on Google Knol.  It’s since been removed.
• After putting up that article, I searched Google Knol for other articles like it.
• Finding a related article, I edited it to put a link to my Knol.
• TinyME – That same article referenced TinyME.
• Having already known about TinyME, and having recently been thinking about and testing some alternate distributions, I decided to check TinyME out.
• On the TinyME home page was a “Latest News” section talking about a split from PCLinuxOS, my current distribution (as of this writing).
• TinyMe is Splitting From PCLinuxOS – I followed that link, and read more.
• Unity Linux – That blog post mentioned Unity Linux, and so I searched for them.
• The Unity Linux homepage said “… created by numerous developers that got their start in PCLinuxOS.” and so I wondered at the mention of “numerous developers”.  What was going on?
• The Unity Linux homepage also said “Some distributions you may see based on Unity Linux: Granular Linux, Producer Edition Linux, TinyMe Linux, TinyFlux Linux, Unity e17 (formerly PCe17OS), and many others.” .. this really floored me.  Most of the remasters had also joined.
• Unity Linux Forum – I checked out the Unity Linux Forum to see what was what.  That’s when I started noticing a lot of familiar faces.  Faces of really capable people.

Progress.

Even in the last few days of organization a lot of progress has been made.  There is a buzz of communication, and all the organizational and development decisions are being settled on much quicker than I would have expected from anyone but this group.

Everyone on the team has their history and their preferences, but there is a real mesh between people.

Right now there is a buzz of activity as some major decisions are made and many short-term urgencies are delt with.  Everyone’s nose is in a pile of work.

It’s all about the toys.

What’s most interesting to me are the communication methods and tools.  There are the classics, and then there are some interesting new additions to the toolkit:

• Feedburner email updates
• DokuWiki documentation
• MyBB Forum – Including a nice hack to view new posts since last check.
• IRC: Freenode #unitylinux
• Twitter updates
• Planet Unity developer blog aggregator.
• Flickr screenshots feed

On top of this, there is Jabber (XMPP protocol) instant messaging, various Google Apps, and the obligatory developer mailing list.

I mean.. twitter updates?  A screenshots feed?  Neat.

Actually it’s all about the people.

So far the most impressive thing has been not just the level of activity, but the level of enthusiasm.  Everyone on board has quite a lot to bring to the table, and many people bring a significant background and skillset with them.

Even keeping it simple.  If you check out one of the remasters, you can see the level of commitment that’s there.  Now realise that their team have become key contributors to Unity Linux.  Then you see another remaster, and another, and another.. and you see one developer after another.  At nearly thirty core people, Unity Linux has some serious potential.

But maybe I’m biased.  Because I’m in their ranks now too.

Sweet.

PS, does anyone else think it’s odd that WordPress’ spell checker doesn’t understand “Google” or “blog”?