Making the Live CD slicker

[David Zeuthen]

On Mon, 2007-12-03 at 22:07 -0500, Jonathan Blandford wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> Having just taken a look at the live CD, here are a couple of specific
> changes that would make that experience better.

Great, this is exactly what we need. The Live CD is pretty slick but
there's still a lot of low hanging fruit...

> - The initial gdm screen is a bit of a hack.  The message that you can
> click on the Fedora feels ugly.  If we must have the GDM screen for
> keyboard or language, we might want to go through firstboot or
> something.

Euw, gods no. Please. I don't want to click many times on a task driven
interface just to get started whenever I boot the live CD. Perhaps if
you could qualify a bit more why the gdm screen "is a bit of a hack" it
would be useful. 

Either way, gdm _needs_ this functionality (think shared computer with
users having varying language preferences); punting this to Fedora
specific tools is in my view a much greater hack. This is the old
mantra: do the work upstream etc. etc.

Another reason for gdm is if you ship a live image with both GNOME and
KDE. Then you'd have several faces to click on.

The alternative is to have language/keyboard selection in the boot
loader (isolinux); to be honest I prefer that to firstboot any day of
the week. As an added bonus it means that we would booth straight into
the desktop without gdm. Still, I think gdm is a much much better
solution.

> - While signing up for a wireless network, it gnome-keyring prompts me
> for a keyring password.

This is a good point, maybe the live cd initscript should set a blank
password for the fedora users keyring. Even better, perhaps the
gnome-keyring bits can detect a blank password (probably harder since it
would require to init the pam stack and check the conversation is
empty).

> - nautilus shows the Live CD on the desktop, and lets you try to
> eject/unmount it.

By design. The idea is that the Live CD itself can contain promo /
information / foreign apps that is also visible when mounting it on
foreign OS's (Windows, Macs). We just haven't used this feature (we
should).

Further, having the icon is a good indicator for people they're running
a live OS. Maybe the eject/unmount should be greyed out; then again, you
can't actually unmount/eject it; you are given an error message if you
try.

> - Just as a minor annoyance, not all the default applications are
> installed (dasher is missing)
> 	
> Any other suggestions?

Yes. Anaconda pulls in a lot of the system-config-* tools that are not
very useful neither on the live cd nor on the installed system. There's
also like three SELinux icons or something in the menus. All of them
really needs to go on the desktop live cd.

      David