SEUL: Re: Status of documentation?

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

> > While seul isn't working on a distrib or installer anymore,
> 
> 	What is the current status of seul? Do you mean that seul is
> 	sleeping or that it focuses is work on the Desktop/environment
> 	parts. This would be great because we could work together!
> 
> 	For L=E6t, the only big new idea is, as far as I know, the order
> 	of install steps :
> 	- make a grafical environment as soon as possible (VGA)
> 	- choose simplified list of packages (with only tested and
> 	confuigured packages inside
> 	- try to propose a partition plan
> 	- do the partitions automagically after user control/fine setup
> 	- install.
> 
> 	If there are suitable pieces of code in the beginning seul project,
> 	that would be great :).
> 
> 						Fran=E7ois.
> 
> Followup to the main l=E6t list.
 
SEUL (www.seul.org) is working primarily on the non-technical aspects of
bringing Linux to end-users -- advocacy documents, managing and coordinating
communications between projects, market/user research and feedback from
end-users, to a limited extent documentation, etc. In addition to this, the
SEUL Educational Project (www.seul.org/edu/) is moving forward with
developing and collecting software that can be used in the schools and at
home for educational purposes. SEUL also hosts a number of software
development/etc projects (eg WXftp, gEDA, FreeHDL, FreeCASE, DrGEO, Project
Independence), as well as providing services for other worthwhile projects
(for example, we keep list archives for Project Computerbank,
www.computerbank.org.au).

I have begun talking in personal mail with Eric Barroca (I believe he's
the leader of the Laetos project?) about ways we can work together. I
would like to see as many of the Laetos products as possible be
distribution-independent, especially if Laetos is based on Debian --
while Debian is a great distrib, it has a long way to go in terms of
actually reaching very many end-users. But there will be no distribution
flamewars on here, I hope.

I encourage people to subscribe to the seul-pub list (mail to
majordomo@seul.org with body 'subscribe seul-pub') for discussion of
collaboration between the various projects (currently the discussion is
on possible collaboration between Laetos and Project Independence). It's
a relatively low-traffic list, in general.

You can read the archives of the discussion at
http://www.seul.org/archives/seul/pub/Apr-1999/threads.html

Things I can provide for Laetos:
* The seul-announce list has 732 people on it currently, and they all
  want to hear about new advances in making Linux better for the
  end-users. I also know several of the news organizations (Dave
  Whitinger of Linuxtoday, Liz from Linux Weekly News, etc) and have
  contacts in other places (SPI, etc).
* I've got a lot of computing space I can put towards Laetos if you
  guys need it. (I expect Debian will be able to help out with this as
  well.)
* We've got quite a few advocacy documents. Our 'Why Linux?' document
  is the most popular, but we've got several others, plus some more
  that are currently in draft form. I encourage people to look at
  http://www.seul.org/archives/seul/pub/Jan-1999/msg00029.html and
  associated links if they want to work on advocacy documents.

The Laetos frontpage mentions a "really big communication effort" to
educate the public about the benefits of free software. I've seen way
too many projects (particularly end-user-oriented projects) fail over
the past three years because they try to do everything at once. I suggest
that Laetos should focus only on the distrib, rather than trying to tackle
advocacy as well. Certainly a distribution is a large enough task for the
moment...

Thanks,
--Roger