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Re: Live CD and others general GNUstep remarks


From: Alex Perez
Subject: Re: Live CD and others general GNUstep remarks
Date: Tue, 08 Feb 2005 12:04:07 -0800
User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 (Windows/20041206)

Nicolas Roard wrote:
Hi,

Finally had a chance to test the live CD :-)

First, I must say the result is quite good -- lots of apps, fast (impressive, considering it's a live CD !),
well integrated... It's really a good way of showing GNUstep.

Now... some (constructive) critics... :-)

First, some general remarks...

<snip>
In the same way, I had an X problem on a laptop, but well, we can't do much about that I guess ... The keyboard mapping was also quite strange (uk keyboard here..), and there wasn't any obvious way
to change that...
Yes, I agree with this...it should ask you first-off which keyboard layout you want, or there should be a /clearly marked/ place to easily change it within moments of the livecd booting up.

The fact that no "well known" web browser such as Firefox is included is imho a mistake -- there's a lot of good docs on the web, and people should be able to access them easily. So as long as we don't have
a good GNUstep webbrowser, we really should include firefox (for example).

I second this opinion. People cannot reference documentation from the web easily because of ideological purity. This is a bad thing, and it's been a common complaint about the otherwise great LiveCD since day one of its' existance.

There's also no easy way to reboot from the livecd, which is also bad..
quitting X should reboot the computer imho.

Yes, probably you're right.

On the GNUstep side, things are mostly ok; but there's something which is a big problem: ProjectCenter doesn't work !!! quite bad for a live cd expressely branded as a development environment... In fact, defaults write ProjectCenter BuildTool /usr/bin/make do the trick -- but it's a shame that this wasn't
even tested before the release !!!

Yes, more application testing needs to happen before each release to alleviate problems like this. This release was the most public of all the GNUstep LiveCD releases, and I doubt we'll get as much press next time.


Second... there's a problem with the default Gorm file created by ProjectCenter. I believe this problem is actually already solved, it would have been nice to include the right
version of PC :-(

Yes, it doesn't seem to have been updated, despite my incessant requests that this be done. Too bad, there's always next time, but still..

Continuing with applications, GNUMail doesn't work either, which is a shame. In fact, the user needs to create manually ~/Mailboxes and touch the Inbox,Sent,Draft boxes... Frankly, that's really bad -- doing so wouldn't
have been difficult :-/

Once again, this is application testing issue. A little QA goes a long way.

And it's a really, really old version of GNUMail !

Heh...

TalkSoup also has this very annoying bug with the scrollview, fixed in recent -gui release... waiting for recent
-gui package should have been perhaps a good idea :-)

Another "problem" is the lack of "demo" files. We've got theses nice applications like Cenon... and no examples !
They should have been bundled...

Once again, I suspect staunch ideology is getting in the way of pragmatics.

Finally, GWorkspace showed by default the dotfiles -- that's wrong, they should be hidden. And GWorkspace should
probably be started by default.

Agreed on both counts. Gurkan, what do you think?

There was also the problem that some apps had their windows "outside" the screen. Actually, at the moment the windows' positions are encoded in the gorm files... and imho that's a bit wrong ! with wmaker it's not that much of a problem, but..

Yes, it's very evil bad and wrong, and I actually just recently asked Greg to address this problem. This worked fine for NeXT originally because their workstations only had a single resolution. It doesn't work fine for us, because we don't have this luxury, and as a result we need to find a solution to the problem instead of pretend it doesn't exist.

Another related problem (not specific to the live cd) is that apps save their windows position in the defaults database -- that's good, but there's a slight problem: If the user change resolution to a lower one... One solution, perhaps, would be to associate the positions with the actual resolution -- so you'd save the positions
for each resolution...

This has been proposed before, and IMHO it makes sense to me...

In summary... this live cd is very good, and things works quite well, but it's a shame that some simple problems like the ones I described were not resolved before the release, while a simple test would have shown
them...

Two propositions:
- before releasing the next version, create a prerelease, inform the mailing list so people here can test it, and then release it -- basically, a bit of testing here would have helped tremendously !
That's what 0.9.4 should have been.
- a short "introduction" panel would be nice -- perhaps something as simple as running TextEdit with an introduction text in it ... something to easily explain the UI and some basic concepts. Ideally, a real multimedia presentation would be nice, but well, we would need an application for that ;-) (if anybody doesn't know what to do, that's
a good application idea, imho... ^_^)

Now.. on a "marketing" point of view, this release was well covered; we had news stories on the following sites:
- slashdot.org
- osnews.com
- linuxfr.org
- macslash.net
- rootpromt.org
- symlink.ch
- macnews.de
Which is why 0.9.4 should have been a prelease....it's a shame that damaged goods got so much publicity when it could have been a lot better with about a day or two of extra testing.

... which actually generated a lot of traffic on gnustep's site ;-) (http://www.gnustep.org/stats/)

A *hell* of a lot.

To sum up: This live CD is good, yet it can become better ;-) (don't forget it's a one-man job -- kudos to tarzeau !!)

It doesn't have to be....in fact, it'd result in a better product if it weren't. Especially when it comes to prerelease testing.

Having a live CD is an excellent thing and we should take care of it -- it's a great demo/introduction tool for GNUstep.

Very much so. And it's resulted in a lot of good press, which we would not have otherwise had, flaws and all. Kudos to Gurkan indeed.

Lots of people are interested in GNUstep, and now, we start to have something nice to use and develop with; I'm waiting
anxiously for EOModeler now ;-)

You and many others..

As one slashdotter put it, GNUstep is a project reaching is critical mass -- we have now nearly all the elements to build
and demonstrate a fantastic environment :-)

Exactly.

Alex Perez





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