About Piren
What is Piren?
Piren is a Debian based live distribution, with Freevo as the main user interface. It's suitable for building an Home Theater, or a firewall system that is also your Media Center, or to add HTPC features to your home-server that is always running and your wife keeps asking you why. It can boot from CD, but you can also install Piren on your HDD, USB stick or small size flash memory.
Piren is shipped with a complete and automatic hardware detection, not requiring any additional software package to be added, but it can be customized very easily to better suite user needs.
Solid bases
Piren is based on Debian Lenny, so it is build with a very stable and secure software base. It provides all the packages needed to run a fully featured Media Center, because Freevo can display pictures and play audio or video files, CD, VCD, DVD or whatever MPlayer can handle.
And if to watch and record analogue or DVB television you may add a specific configuration, surfing the web is directly available from the main interface thanks to Mozilla Firefox, version 3.
For your security, Piren read from a static image, with all the write commands reverted to RAM by default. If you want, it's possible to preserve this feature even if you install Piren to your hard-disk, so you will never risk to compromise your system.
Maximal flexibility
Piren behavior is very similar to many of the other live Linux distributions being based on Debian and related packages, so is able to run inside almost every PC with every provided feature. It contains all the applications you need for a professional quality media center: Freevo 1.8.1 with MPlayer (and mencoder) 1.0-rc2, X.Org 7.3, Mozilla Firefox 3.0.3, a full Linux kernel 2.6.26, and much more.
Piren target are multimedia platforms, that can have different philosophies depending on each user needs, so is ready to be easily customized to provide you the best environment available to reflect your personal mean for this definition.
Personal, for real
Piren wants to provide everyone their personal Home Theater, in the form of a lightweight, live Linux distribution. This goal is achieved providing an easy way to burn a new live CD with all the changes any user wants. This can be done with the utility piren-remaster, adding DSL (tar.gz) archives with already made configuration files or even new applications, or changing the live file-system: it can be enhanced installing any Debian package or made even thinner, removing unwanted Piren features.
It is all up to you, but the easy way.
Piren 8.12 goes gold
4 December, 2008 - 13:02 — DavideAfter lots of time, the very last Piren version is finally available!
The main software base is changed, becoming even simpler. However, the final image is bigger than before because the main target for the official release is now a 256 Mb flash memory, so you can find a more updated software base and several demo files that you can enjoy directly from the ISO: a big "thank you" goes to Immanuel Casto, a great italian singer, for providing the multimedia content (including his last video).
Piren 8.12 will be available soon
2 December, 2008 - 12:20 — DavideDebian Lenny is not yet finished, however is really stable and offers a much more updated software base. Moreover, Freevo is improved a lot with version 1.8.x.
So it's time to release a new Piren version!
Most of the work is already done, and I plan to release version 8.12 in the next few days. I need to write a bit of documentation to include directly within the ISO image, and I'm waiting for some multimedia files to include as demo content from a well known Italian singer that will release his last video as preview with this Piren version!
Piren MGS 8.2
18 February, 2008 - 02:15 — DavidePiren MGS (Multimedia Gateway System) is a Piren derived distribution, that expands the common multimedia system with networking and security features that are particularly suitable for a SOHO environment, but that is powerful enough also for professional purposes.
Once loaded, you can configure and administer it using the web browser available from the Freevo user interface, or every other host in your LAN.
The main features are listed below:
Piren 8.2 released!
4 February, 2008 - 02:30 — DavideIt is time for another Piren update, trying to improve the live Media Centre distribution more and more on each release.
While the main software base seems to be the same, there are several new features that are giving this version a big step forward.
As the previous release, Piren 8.2 is based upon Debian Etch R2 and uses only Debian Etch related packages. Most of the system comes from the official Debian repositories, but there are others for some of the key packages, like Freevo or MPlayer.
