[RULE] Reflections on a Debianized RULE (or RULE'ized Debian?)

[Paul Nijjar]

On Mon, 20 Oct 2003, M. Fioretti wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 20, 2003 11:34:03 at 11:34:03AM -0500, James Miller (office)  jamtat at mailsnare.net  wrote:
>
>
> > ...the Debian project link that was provided in an earlier post
> > ... offerred some automated install routine ... [which] only works
> > as a network install, however.
>
> I haven't read that link yet, but remember that the project is based
> on FAI, Debian equivalent of Red Hat Kickstart: both are meant to
> speed up many equal installs, not to make the initial setup easier.

	The installer is indeed currently based on FAI, and it takes quite
a bit of haggling to set up a server that will do the network installs. In
some situations (schools, computer recycling operations, etc) this may be
appropriate, which is one reason we released the sources.

	One extension to FAI puts the installer on a bootable CD, so you
no longer need to set up a server. I have not gotten this working yet,
however, and I may not for some time (perhaps until the next release of
Debian is out).

> > I suppose people involved in the ease-of-installation aspect of a
> > RULE-ized Debian
>
> Ease of installation and memory requirements are partly independent.
> This is demonstrated by Debian difficulty of use. If one has a good
> automatic hardware detection system and a decent set of character
> based menus in his native language the install is much easier than it
> seems.
	The grand new installer may solve some of these problems. Debian
also has a number of other installers that may be of use -- there is a
package called "autoinstall" which is similar to kickstart, and also a
graphical installer called "pgi" (which is probably not appropriate for
RULE-based machines).

> > one thing a RULE-ized Debian could use and which already exists for
> > RH RULE is a listing of programs that work well on older hardware.
>
> I disagree on this, instead:
>
> > This is the point on which a RULE-ized Debian and the current RH
> > based RULE are fully on a par
>
> The low resources programs may be found on both sets of CDs. The
> problem is if one doesn't know in advance which they are he will spend
> weeks reading the package descriptions and configuring everything by
> hand. RULE wants to get to the point where one selects "basic desktop"
> and:
>
> * finds all and only those programs in the menus and on disk.
> * they are configured to work together (ie mutt opens word attachments
>   in abiword, opens e-links on URLs, etc... without prior manual
>   fiddling)

	I have not gotten MIME to work right yet.

	The goals of the Working Centre Linux Project are a little bit
different than RULE, in that we are explicitly trying to make the system
look and feel like Windows. To that end, we are using the (now
unsupported) GNOME Midnight Commander as our file manager. MIME support
existed for this file manager, but only as integrated with the rest of
GNOME -- so for now this is broken.

	Debian has the infrastructure to make MIME access to programs
fairly straightforward, but so far I don't have a file manager type
program that works well AND looks like something from Windows.

> Last time I checked Debian was not really up to this task.
>
> I repeat that you are right on the main point: regardless of the
> distro, we could and should partner to list the most efficient
> programs, *and* the compilation options to make them even lighter:
> once that is written down, packaging them as .deb or .rpm is almost
> trivial.

	One nice thing about Debian is that it supports lightweight
versions of many of its programs. For example, Abiword comes as a GTK-only
package or a GNOME-enabled one, so we can avoid installing GNOME and still
use Abiword.

	Most of the software we use in our project is similar to software
used in RULE. We use IceWM as a window manager, and Opera (yes, yes, I
know) as the web browser, but almost all other software is the same. At
some point I will submit a list of software that we have found that the
RULE project does not already have listed.

	In fact, Opera is proving to be a big problem, because version 7
of the software is unusable without lots and lots of RAM. I personally
use w3m and I like links, but neither of these is as fully-featured as I
would want in a web browser for general use. So finding a good web browser
that will both run well and that people will want to use is proving to be
a challenge.

- Paul (WCLP "developer")


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