A repost of the first draft of the announce

[jfm2@club-internet.fr]

This is a repost of the first draft of the announce.  It is for
informing newcomers of what the distribution will be.  Notice that the
grammar problems who were mentionned to me are still unfixed.



		Alpha version of Independence distrib
		 (Linux for the masses)


1) About the project:

Project Independence arose from the frustration of seeing that Linux
is still too difficult for the common man.  Linux must become easy to
use or it will remain in a little programmer's ghetto.  We don't
accept that.

Project Independence is an open project developped by volunteers
working not for profit.  Their work is licensed under GPL.  In case
you want to join look at <URL>.  Don't believe we need only
programmers.  Gurus, manual writers and propagandists/lobbyists will be
welcome.  Whatever your skill it can be to good use

This project doesn't aim to cure cancer or save world all by itself:
problems like unsupported hardware or lack of apps in crucial areas
cannot be solved at distribution level.

Instead it tries to build a distrib like we the _users_ feel it should
be built.  We don't care nor for Unix traditions nor for commercial
considerations.

Other goals are to promote user friendly apps, fight "pedantic
hackerism" in Linux and lobby hardware manufacturers for them
providing drivers.  We are sick of seeing hardware with drivers for
Macs or OS/2 and not for Linux.


2)  Main ideas implemented in this version of the distrib

The distrib has been built by taking a popular distrib (RedHat 5.2) and
then trying to fix problems one by one.

Networking is the only source of help for an isolated user.  These
tend to use PPP.  Thus we added easy mail and news clients suitable
for countries where online time is expensive.  We also included a nice
FTP client (Wxftp) and TkIrc.

New users need to read docs.  Sometimes they are unable to print.  For
that reason we felt having the Postscript viewers defaulting to nearly
unreadable output like it is being done now was unnacceptable.  We
tweaked them for quality rather than speed being the default.  We also
upgraded Ghostscript to 5.10 and added a TrueType font server.

Linux should be fun but being fun for programmers is not enough.  We
tried to include software for artistic creation be it music
(Rosegarden, timidity) or images (Povray, the Moonlight modeller, Sane
1.0).  Of course we added some games too.

If the user has to boot Windows to manage his check book then Linux
will remain a toy for him.  We tried to include software for the life
who is rumored to be after programming.  :-) Also some goodies useful
for real people.

Linux should have a good GUI so we added KDE.  Future releases will
provide Gnome too.  It should have easy application software so we
also added the FileRunner file manager, a nice editor (Cooledit) and
the Maxwell word processor.

A new user is overwhelmed by problems so we tried to make the apps as
plug and play it was posssible.  In particular we allow a clean
install (nor hand nor automatic edits) of KDE, X fonts or font
servers and widget specific ressources (needed by neXtAw).

There are areas where Linux doesn't have adeqaute software so we
include Wine.  Next time we will try to provide the special
configuration for playing DirectX games.


3)  Bugs.

-There are many features we would like who are still not implemented,
many areas left uncovered.

-Sometimes the programs we choose are not be the best in their
area.  A fair number of them are not the latest version.

-The installation is vanilla RedHat with names changed for copyright
reasons.  There is room for improvement.

-It has had only minimal testing.


4)  Forthcoming.

The following version will focus on solving the cron problem, on
providing servers adequate for small companies (the present ones are
an overkill) and will make first steps towards "info going to the user
instead of the opposite".

-- 
			Jean Francois Martinez

Project Independence: Linux for the Masses
http://www.independence.seul.org