Re: Announce: Simple End-User Linux (SEUL) Project
> One thing I've never been convinced of is the idea in some distribution
> projects that stripping down the number of available packages to only a
> relatively few "essential" applications is a good thing for new, home or
> office users. With a $2 Debian CD from CheapBytes, one has access to
> hundreds of packages -- why restrict that access?
I don't intend to strip anything down, just provide a more coherent, unified
interface. This will likely involve GNOME, as it appears to be the best
project out there (and has the backing [independently, it seems] of both
Debian and RedHat).
I don't think, given our target audience, that we should put everything that
exists onto the CD. An end-user of the type we're targeting does *not* want
to have to wade through what they would consider to be piles of random,
useless, or cryptic packages in order to find what they want, which may be a
game, or a WP to type up their mom's cookie recipe. In the context of SEUL,
more is not always better, unless it is coherently presented.
> Could the project goals of SEUL be met by Debian somehow? It already is a
> stable, robust distribution, and is not going to go away. It also has gotten
> easier to install and maintain with recent releases. What if improvements
> were made to Debian's install and upgrade facilities to make it even easier,
> and/or more documentation was created in the form of useful tutorials for
> common procedures -- would this meet SEUL's goals? If so, it would save a
> lot of work both for the SEUL team (who would be creating a new distribution
> from scratch, which realistically would probably never be as robust as
> Debian), and for the Debian project (who would gain the assistance of the
> SEUL folks in making Debian easier to install and maintain).
I have been talking with Bruce Perens about ways to try to coordinate all the
existing efforts. What I'm seeing is that the community is indeed
fragmenting, but it has been doing so for quite a while. I do not want to
see SEUL contribute to that.
Personally, I'd like to see SEUL become part of the glue that starts
organizing all the several dozen random projects (advocacy, publicity, and
development alike). I will be presenting some of these ideas to Bruce and
others in the very near future, and very soon after that I intend to post all
the information I have and try to find some consensus within the community.
TTYAL,
Omega
Erik Walthinsen <omega@seul.org> - SEUL Project system architect
__
/ \ SEUL: Simple End-User Linux -
| | M E G A Creating a Linux distribution
_\ /_ for the home or office user
--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
debian-user-request@lists.debian.org .
Trouble? e-mail to templin@bucknell.edu .
Reply to: