Re: Live CD as a focal point for reviving Jr development
Harry,
Good to hear from you.
On Mon, 2005-10-03 at 10:37 -0700, Harry McGregor wrote:
> It was Knoppix 3.3 based. I did the remaster myself. We also had 5000
> of the CDs pressed and gave them to teachers etc.
I take it this was a manual process? I wouldn't mind doing that again
if it is easy, but if it's hard, we should look at (semi-)automating the
process so that we can more easily tweak them and keep them up to date
with the moving target that is sid.
> > > One thing we had in the works was a custom theme for IceWM, which was
> > > going to be the window manager we were going to use for the CD (it's
> > > lightweight, can be flashy, and yet does limit quite a bit of the
> > > confusing dialogs that other larger WMs/DEs have)
I had forgotten that it was IceWM-based. That's one thing that the OSEF
CD would have over my proposed Ubuntu experiment, which drags in a lot
of GNOME stuff that certainly makes life easier for a "typical" desktop
user (e.g. being able to plug in your camera or pop in a CD and have
them appear as icons on the desktop,) but just adds bloat without much
added value for child users. So long as the desktop has buttons to
press that start the children's favourite applications, that's as much
WM as we really need for the younger kids.
> One of the other goals for V3 of the CD was to have the face browser
> login screen, and have a "pre/kinder" "1st/2nd/3rd grade" "4th/5th
> grade" "middle school" "high school" "parent/teacher" and "everything"
> login.
Interesting. I can see how this would be useful at home, too. I'm not
terribly thrilled with the public-school oriented category names,
though. But we can quibble about that later. :) Good concept.
> One the biggest complaints we got is that the CD had too much stuff, and
> trying to navigate programs you don't know is not easy, etc. By
> breaking it up into a custom menu/login for each we could minimize the
> list.
Agreed. Andreas has done some work converting Jr. to work with cdd-dev,
and cdd-dev supports CDD-specific menus. It is probably best to build
on that. However, last I spoke with Andreas, the whole cdd-dev effort
was in flux, so I never proceeded to the next step, replacing what I
have in sid now with his work.
> Don't know either... OSEF has been sleeping as well.
Do you at least have a current email address for at least each of the
board members? I'd love to pick up where we left off.
Ben
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