The features page

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

This is the page telling about Indy's features submitted for comments.
It is the last one for today.


--
                Jean Francois Martinez

The Independence project: because Linux should be for everyone
http://independence.seul.org

Title: Features

Features of Independence 7.1

Independence 7.1 is based on RedHat 7.1 with the following features
added:

• Journalized filesystem support:

  Independence defaults to using XFS filesystem. This allows fast and graceful recovery after an unclean shutdown

• Better printing

  : Both for quality of output and job management. Independence ships newer more advanced drivers and a superior printing system (CUPS vs LPRng) respective to RedHat 7.1.

• Emphasis on artistic creation and multimedia

  : Broadcast2000 (video creation), glame and SoundStudio (audio creation), xine and xmovie (video players), povray (ray tracing), Blender (image synthesis, game creation) and a beefed up GIMP with color management. But Indy does not aim to impress the user with tons of software, we want the user taking advantage of it and that is why we included the Gimp User Manual and a set of tutorials for Blender.

• Better integration in windows networks:

  Through the use of Samba 2.2 and ACLs Indy is not only easier to setup but it has more functionnality. When Linux is used as a client in an SMB network Indy allows user to get all the functionality its Windows-using coworkers are getting: he will get that Popup message from the printng server telling him his job is finished and Indy ships the only Linux neighborhood browser who really works. Indy users no longer have to endure the condescending smiles of their Windows-using coworkers while they struggle mounting an SMB share.

• Improved networking:

  Ethereal and etherape allow to have a better view of what is happenning in the network. Sendmail is replaced by the more secure and easier to setup Postfix. Indy also supports the unexpensive USB-based SpeedTouch ADSL modems.

• Massive modernizations:

  Gnome 1.4, galeon 0.11 (mozilla 0.9.2 too), XFree 4.1 and abiword 0.9 who is a nice word processor and a far cry from the useless 0.7 shipped in the original distribution.

• Games:

  FlightGear (flight simulation), Chromium (shootthemup) and a newer version of Freeciv (civilization clone)

• Purge of inferior software:

  In Indy we consider you do a disservice to the user by adding obsolete or inferior software who gives a bad image of Linux and could trash users's desktop. That is why we are purging Indy. Some of the programs removed are: twm, mh, exmh. More will follow. We also removed the clustering software whose sin is to be of use for very few people.

• Miscellaneous:

  Money management with gnucash, support to visually disabled people with emacspeak, a Linux manual: rute