Desktop for elderly people (Was: showcasing debian-edu at debconf and desktop for elderly people.)

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

[shirish शिरीष]
> Hi all,

Hi. :)

> One more thing, over the last several days, months it somehow seems to
> me that the same desktop that we desire to have for young people have
> lot of similarity for elderly people as well. They also want
> clutter-free interfaces, fewer apps and bold and big type-faces as
> well as pretty iconography. I know that description sort of slants it
> between debian-jr and debian-edu and do know that with accessibility
> tools the above can be achieved to some extent. But that if the
> elderly people have had some prior human-computer interaction. If not,
> then s/he has the same issues as kids have when they see a digital UI
> for the first time.

It would be great with such reduced desctop option.  Not only for
elderly people, but also for office use.

To do this, the debian-edu package will need some restructuring.  I
would suggest to add a new tasksel test to select the wanted desktop
facet.  The edu packages could be moved into separate tasks and only
installed when the edu facet is enabled.

I suspect this block in deskto-other is the part to drop for non-edu
installs:

  Recommends:  education-astronomy, education-chemistry, \
               education-electronics, education-geography, \
               education-graphics, education-language, \
               education-logic-games, education-mathematics, \
               education-music, education-physics, education-misc
  Why:         Include all educational tasks proposed by Linex.

If you want to work on this, I can provide ideas and be a sparring
partner if you need someone to discuss this with. :)

-- 
Happy hacking
Petter Reinholdtsen