Re: [Debian-NP] a couple of ideas

[Micah Anderson <micah@riseup.net>]

On Wed, 16 Jul 2003, Stephen Gran wrote:

> > 
> > I think that if we focus on identifying what needs our target audience
> > has for something like this then we will find that a lot of what the
> > client Morphix has would fit, and we could easily tailor that to have
> > the additional things that we need, and remove the things that we
> > dont.
> 
> I had the idea that it might be simpler for people that don't know much
> about computers to have 2 cd's, one labeled server and one labeled
> desktop, with a different assortment of software on each.  In the
> install sections, there could be questions about the relative age of the
> hardware (or perhaps autodetection? - parsing /proc/cpuinfo would be
> trivial) that can help the person installing whether to go with a
> regular hard drive install, or opt for a thin client approach on the
> desktop.  The server install might do the same kind of parsing, and make
> some warning noise if too many services are being offered (although
> really, I can't remember the last time I really taxed either of my low
> end servers, besides some GB-sized NFS transfers, and even that didn't
> make the server unresponxive, just a bit slow)


As Mako pointed out, the Skolelinux project is aiming to provide such
thin-client support, and the limitations are such that it is difficult
to scale this sort of thing. However, it might make sense that if we
were to identify what specific hardware requirements would need to be
met and this was asked of the user installing the client, then in some
cases a thin-client approach might make sense. It pretty much is
required that the organization at least have a switch (instead of a
hub), a server machine that is powerful enough to handle the number of
clients that would be attached...

> Perhaps, though, my experiences have slewed me too far to the other
> side, and people think that the target audience could handle a little
> bit more of a task-style setup (a la tasksel)?  I'm willing to be
> corrected, but I was thinking aiming for a straightforward install that
> the user didn't have to do much more than enter network information and
> click 'OK' a bunch of times was the way to go.

Ease of use/configuration is necessary, having little or no
configuration questions is required.

micah