Overview, roadmap, priorities
On 17 Jul 2000, Camm Maguire wrote:
> Greetings! Some kind of overview on work needing to be done, with
> priorities, would be great to develop on this list. Packaging stuff
> is a lot easier than conceiving what a useful system would contain.
Good stuff,
Well, in terms of packaging "an OS our children want to run", I'm afraid
this goal is going to constantly get muddled with my own ideas as a parent
of what is best for the kids.
There are, of course, the goals you have already seen at:
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-jr
Re-reading those, does that spark any ideas?
Observing the kids over the last couple of months, I was intrigued to find
that my 10-year-old daughter is captivated by a handful of very simple
programs to which she has unrestricted access throughout the day:
1. dict
2. boggle (from bsdgames)
3. hangman (also from bsdgames)
There are special "video game" turns throughout the week which are limited
in length. We are increasingly uncomfortable with the legal issues
surrounding the non-free games our kids like, and would like to see those
be replaced with free ("guilt-free" :) alternatives.
Also, I observed friend of my daughter's with her new (to her :) 486 that
we found for her, with 8M & running win 3.1 (well, that was the easiest in
terms of administration, and a match for the pathetic hardware). I asked
her if she'd like me to download anything for her. She remarked that she
mostly liked the card game (solitaire) and would like to see some word
games.
I guess it depends on the interests of the children, but the common thread
that seems to emerge is that they are easily hooked on things that involve
exploration (the word games & dictionary being ways of exploring &
expanding the world of words) with their computers. There are many other
such "worlds" to explore. And that's one direction we might take the
building of a list of priorities.
But then there are more mundane elements of a system, too, that are hidden
to the user. We've explored already some sys admin issues. Perhaps one
area that I think might be a place to start is tools for easily subsetting
the available commands on the system for easier access by a targetted set
of users. I'm thinking of the menu system, primarily. Each user, by
default, gets the whole mess of programs installed on their system that
have been entered into the menu system. Sure, some breaking down of those
into categories has already been done, and that's a bit of a help (e.g. my
kids probably are more interested in the stuff under "Games" than "Apps ->
Programming") Would it be helpful to provide the adminstrator with an
easy way of managing different menu subsets for different user groups?
I've tried a bit of tweaking of the menu system myself, and I just wasn't
satisfied with the amount of hand-massaging was required.
Just so we don't get off on a tangent on that one, I'm not sure that
narrowing down options is such a big priority. After all, it seems to be
a bit contrary to "exploring worlds" that I mentioned earlier.
Well, I'd better stop rambling and let some others throw their ideas in.
Where do we start? What are our top priorities? What packages should be
tackled first?
Ben
--
nSLUG http://www.nslug.ns.ca synrg@sanctuary.nslug.ns.ca
Debian http://www.debian.org synrg@debian.org
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