Lately, I've been quite busy building a lot of various Mandriva Flash versions.

We recently offered Mandriva Flash keys to KDE developpers, and this was a special version of the latest Flash 2007, not just a random one that we got on stock :-p

Of course, it contained a special Mandriva/aKademy theme (background images and bootsplash), but this is not the more exciting feature.

This Flash key can be extended to run a KDE4 desktop, by putting an additionnal KDE4 module on the key. It contains a KDE4 desktop snapshot (basically alpha 2) with Nepomuk features. It is roughly made of KDE4 packages from Cooker rebuilt for 2007.0, with only a few hacks, and a custom background (our logo with drop shadows, using gimp which now works on Cooker!).

This was quite the first time that we did such an additionnal module (there is already some support for lang modules in the next Flash 2007 Spring version, but that's secret :-p). To make it short, creating this module was about mounting the Flash loopback and a temporary directory using unionfs, chroot inside the union, install KDE4 packages, cleaning a bit, and compress the temporary directory into a new squashfs loopback.

Nothing really extra-ordinary, but I was amazed by how fast we did it, the KDE4 packages from Helio (almost) worked out of the box, and the build process of the Flash module went quite smoothly.

So, thank you KDE hackers for all your work, I hope you have enjoyed aKademy 2007 as well as our special release!