On Thu, 26 Mar 2009 08:32:51 +0100 (CET) Andreas Tille <tillea@rki.de> wrote: > On Wed, 25 Mar 2009, Daniel Dickinson wrote: > > I'm quite hesitant about this. Beeing a "newbie" has no clear > definition and thus you will quickly find that you soon will loose > the focus inside your project. There was a Debian Desktop project > which is also mentioned in the Blends docs but it seems that it was a > failure. Yes I agree that there are many things to fix here - but I > doubt that it makes much sense to work on this in the Blends effort. Ah, well yes, I guess it's not a good title. What I really mean is 'a lightweight desktop which will meet the needs/wants of a strong cross-selection of low income computer users'. Let me clarify. I am building computers to give away and am basing them on Debian. To begin with most users will be Debian Newbies, so the environment has to work easily enough for when they are getting started, but what it is really about is using old computers and refurbishing them, and having a system that will do most of what most users (who will be low income) will want. So we start with a basic XFCE desktop, then add some packages that I think are missing from a basic desktop install, (e.g. for digital cameras / mp3 players for the kids, etc), plus a couple of things that show what they can do that they might not know about. Basically it's a more complete desktop then the 1 CD desktop that Debian distributes because I am not sure the users will have an internet connection so the desktop needs to have enough on it (preferably pre-installed because they are newbies) without installing from the internet. I personally find Debian's default desktop rather sparse in terms of what I actually want to do (not counting development) and thing that IM (for those who do have internet), some games, a to do program and memo pad, and little touches like that make for a better presentation of what Debian can be, besides just a 'Windows' with hardly anything on it. Not sure how to best describe that though. The low income part may or may not actually be important for package selection (e.g. probably not installing gtkpod by default), but is definitely about a (for most cases) sufficient selection of lightweight stuff that is on the *only* computer for a family, all pre-installed. (Two exceptions for lightweight because there really aren't presently any good enough alternatives: iceweasel and openoffice.org; yes I know about AbiWord and Gnumeric and KOffice - they suck, especially at MS compatibility; I tried making them my office programs for a while and gave up because they just don't hack it due to missing features and inability to render MS/OOo documents well). -- And that's my crabbing done for the day. Got it out of the way early, now I have the rest of the afternoon to sniff fragrant tea-roses or strangle cute bunnies or something. -- Michael Devore GnuPG Key Fingerprint 86 F5 81 A5 D4 2E 1F 1C http://gnupg.org
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