usability: unplugged ethernet cable on an office desktop

[David Nielsen]

tir, 15 08 2006 kl. 22:38 +0530, skrev Rahul:
> David Zeuthen wrote:
> > On Tue, 2006-08-15 at 22:10 +0530, Rahul wrote:
> >> David Zeuthen wrote:
> >>
> >>> [1] : well, all the daily crob jobs like updatedb etc. plus much more
> >>> would have to go :-)
> >> Not very relevant to larger idea of a derived distro which might very 
> >> well be a good thing to try but we dont run updatedb cron by default for 
> >> a while now.
> > 
> > Well, I'm aware of that, but the script is still installed with tons of
> > other stuff that we don't need on a modern desktop [1]. There's so many
> > things we have right now that we don't need in a desktop distro.
> > 
> > For example, the very idea of using anaconda to install the OS is just
> > wrong in 2006. The way you want to do this (and Ubuntu is doing this
> > already) is clearly to have a bootable CD with a "Install OS to hard
> > disk" icon that does what you want. Nothing more, nothing less. 
> 
> They do have a traditional style installer too. I was discussing the 
> Live CD with installer option in fedora-livecd list and Jeremy Katz 
> didnt appear too keen on it. However I completely agree with you on 
> having this atleast as a option. If we have enough people willing to do 
> a Fedora Desktop derivative, then lets just do that. We are going down 
> that path of enabling such things to happen anyway.

I would definitely lend any help I can to such a project, I use Fedora
exclusively as my desktop OS so I have a great interest in seeing it be
all it can be even if that means taking it out of the context of the
regular Fedora distribution. I don't especially see why we couldn't do
it within Fedora but if it's preferred to do it in a seperate sub
project then that would be fine by me.

I'm however not a big fan of livecd installers, I think livecds are
great for testing but if I want to install something then I'm in favor
of the "old school" Fedora method. It just seems cleaner to me. Also the
installers of that kind I've tried so far aren't really all that good. I
recently played with the Ubuntu installer and it doesn't support half
the nice things Anaconda does, e.g. I was completely unable to perform
the some what simple task of setting up my two 400gig drives in a RAID,
let alone up LVM on top of that. Sure that could be added but we have
that in a perfectly fine form within Anaconda already.

But Fedora would make a great foundation for a top of the line secure
desktop with all the lastest in cool technology for that market.
NetworkManager just being one of them, I could see us having fun with
stuff like Galago and Telepathy, there are plenty of areas where the
desktop experience can be improved.

- David Nielsen