[BadVista Advocate] Vista owners

[Nuno J. Silva]

On Sat, 28 Apr 2007 15:12:22 -0400 (EDT)
"Jacob Maynard" <indymaynard at maynard.homelinux.com> wrote:

> I'm for it. I would be willing to bet that with all of us chiming in
> on wanting to help with the BadVista site, BadVista wouldn't have any
> problems helping out.
> 
> I see you have already defined your position in this effort. That's
> outstanding.
> 
> We need to cover some basic areas on this one:
> 1. Games - Cover the games that are out there and which run natively
> on GNU/Linux, and cover which ones run with WinE. But this is going
> to be the toughest selling point because there's not a huge push for
> games on GNU/Linux with the same reputation as major video games on
> Windows and the XBox/PS.

A section about console emulators (PS, NES, SNES, GameCube, XBox, etc)
would be interesting too.

> 2. Productivity - Obviously OpenOffice.org is on the list. We can
> include StarOffice, if anyone thinks it is worth mentioning while we
> are presenting it to the users. The biggest thing that we need to
> focus on is agreeing on standards. Thunderbird or Evolution for
> e-mail, even though I think that most of us use Evolution. GNUCash
> should be included, too.

IMO StarOffice shouldn't be included, it isn't FLOSS.

For email, claws mail would be on the list too. 

And please include (La)TeX and The GIMP.

> 3. Multimedia - Our distribution should have
> support for all of this already, or an easy place to download a
> binary codec package. This is almost as big as the games, if not more
> so.

Video edition software may be another big point.

> 
> More advanced areas we can work on may include the command line. You
> don't want to start off with the command line, though. That's where
> people say, "Umm, I have something else to do." I know that most of
> us can't live without the command prompt, but your average user is
> intimidated by it. Sorry, Yasith. You can't just open them up right
> off of the bat to this.

If there isn't already one, an introduction to all *n?x shells (or
maybe one introduction per shell) would do it.

> So I guess that the question should come up; are we intending on
> creating a distribution of our own that includes all of this support,
> or are we going to decide on a distribution collectively. I've heard
> gNewSense, and from the short amount of reading I've done on it, this
> is creating our own distro. Can we clarify and take a vote on this?
> This should come second to the website, though.

Something which is lightweight, fast, and includes only free software
(and, if needed, open source software - I don't know what would be the
FSF position about this, since OS is not the same as FS), the free
software we specify here, will fit.

But some technical decisions must be taken. The work of building a
distro from zero and widespread it implies building package
repositories and a compatible and lightweight package manager.
It is easier to pick an existing package system and use it (Debian's
system and apt-get, Gentoo Portage and Paludis, &c).

-- 
Nuno J. Silva
Lisbon, Portugal
Homepage: <http://njsg.no.sapo.pt/> & <http://palpatine.hopto.org/>
Registered Linux User #402207 - http://counter.li.org

Using Claws Mail 2.9.0

Gentoo Base System release 1.12.9
Linux 2.6.17-gentoo-r7 i686 Pentium II (Deschutes)

-=-=-
“In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has had
to worry about where the next meal would come from.” -- Peter S.
Drucker, who invented management 
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