Re: "what's up"

[JF Martinez <jfm2@club-internet.fr>]

> 
> Civileme wrote:
> > 
> > Ummmm,
> > 
> > Friendliness...
> > 
> [snip]
> > my 2c
> > 
> > Civileme
> 
> Understood. I'll try and put the current independence distribution on my
> spare partition, and check back with you all later on.
> 

The official version is in
belegost.seul.org:/independence/Indy-6.0-0.8

It was never really released because RedHat 6.1 was out before I could
write the major face lift to the web site I esteemed necassary.

> BTW, how alive are we?
> 

We have been three quarters dead.  I was the only one working and I
was disheartend.  Presently we are raising from the dead, there is one
person writing a program for Indy, another one warning for security a
a third one who has built some packages and I will give some work to
the web designer

> It is always good to know of a project in which phase it is: start,
> alive, or dying. I guess we're on a start level: something quite new,
> and still missing some publicity and developers in fact. Please inform
> me of your activities, etc. so that I can get an idea of the state of
> this project.
> 


About why Indy is needed: you can build a user friendly distrib and
still miss your target.  Take for instance Gnomba that allows you to
mount Windows shares by clicking on them.  It is included in Mandrake.
User friendly isn't it?  In fact it is useless.  It finds windows
boxes by scanning one by one every possible IP address instead of
doing the proper thing who is to issue a broadcast to finf the master
browser and then contact it.  Gnomba can be of use in home LANs where
you only have a couple addresses to scan but it is obvious from its
design that nor its authors nor the designers of the distributions who
include it have ever worked in a company where Windows is dominant.

And that is the goal of Indy building a distribution who is adequate
for those people who are outside the Unix realm.

If you think about Unix you will find that it is based on the idea
that someone will teach it to you or at least that you will have
someone at hand to help you.  Eccentricities like naming 'man' the
help command in order to save a keystroke would have been imposssible
if the user targeted had been supposed to be an isolated user who has
to learn the heroic way..

You are also supposed to have a ssytem administrator at hand and that
system administartor being able to spend weeks reading docs.  This is
only possible if dozens of people around him are going with company's
main business but if you think in for instance a couple doctors who
are associated it is obvious you have to break the Unix mold or tell
them to use Macs: they don't have time to read HOWTOs and they can't
afford a full time system administrator.  Indy tries to push the info
under the user's nose, provide better config software and ASAP will
try to provide servers more adequate for small organizations (the
install needs to be modified before)

Because Unix was too expensive for personal use and not cost effective
for most desktop applications then distributions have put server apps
under the spotlights and neglected the desktop and the personal user
and this is also an area where Indy is different bacause we strongly
strive for remving the need for a personal user to reboot Windows and
try both to include productivity software despite being restricted to
free one and remove server-like assumptions like manual mountings or a
box powered up 24 hours a day.

However one of the most important goals of Indy is trying to empower
the people with distribution designe because until now we have been
getting distributions who were patterned like the world their
designers were living: Unix world while we live in a different world.

-- 
			Jean Francois Martinez

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