[BadVista Advocate] Vista owners

[Mostafa Razavi]

I guess we should definitely go with an existing distribution. If it has 
problems, we can help fix them. IMHO, it's far better than starting from 
scratch.

Concerning gNewSense, and other FSF-approved distros, if anyone has 
experiences working with them, please let us know about their advantages 
and problems. I have not worked with any of them. My last experience was 
with Feisty Fawn, which was great in simplicity of various task, but it 
uses proprietary drivers. I think Feisty, despite this problem, has good 
lessons to teach us. For example, it's method of tackling the problem of 
codecs is excellent.

Homayoon

Jacob Maynard 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.
> 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.
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> More later.
>
> Jacob
>