Re: State of the distribution (edited)

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

In message <19980926065945.1656.qmail@sidney.remcomp.fr>, jfm2@club-internet.fr writes:
>At this point we cannot deploy a complete distrib due to lack of disk
>space.  What we have is an upgrade kit allowing to go from RedHat 5.1
>to Independence 0.0.0.1.  It allows testing, proof of concept, CD
>building but nothing more.

Note that www.mirrors.seul.org keeps hourly-updated mirrors of
redhat-4.2/updates, 5.0/updates, 5.1/updates, and contrib. But it's
true that I don't keep an entire 5.1 distribution onhand.

Roughly how much space are we talking here? (for everything you want
to offer)

>6)  GAMES:  What other use for a computer?
>
>Mirrormagic (small facinating Amiga game), xkobo, FlightGear (Flight
>simulator) but we need more of them.

seul-dev-apps is considering writing some games. Micah has already
written up a couple prototypes; hopefully he'll package them soon
and mention it to freshmeat, and he can take off from there. If any
of you wants to write/update some neat simple short games that aren't
all about spraying blood everywhere (quake is great, I know, but
some people don't like their 6-year-olds playing quake), let me know.
The way to get more games is either to find them or write them.

>- -More Doc: It is diificult to find what you need in the general Linux
> doc.  Also at times people use other systems because they don't know
> Linux has software for the job.  That is why I want to put Woven
> Goods in the dsitrib.  It is more attractive than classic doc and it
> also includes a database of available software.
>
>- -A manual: The RedHat one is not comprehensive enough and in addition
> sometimes it is completely unadequate (see above for the PPP example).

http://www.usered.freeservers.com/
but I haven't heard from them lately. We'll see.

>- -A better install: The importance of installation is far too
> exagerated.  Real problems begin after that.  However I would like:
> the user being assisted for partitionning, sofware selction according
> to use (home, server, hacker), PPP networking

Some ideas on a better installer are getting discussed on
seul-dev-install currently. We could use a volunteer to go through the
old seul-dev-install archives, fish out useful information, and make
a faq out of it, for new people considering writing an installer.

--Roger