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.