Live CD and others general GNUstep remarks

[Nicolas Roard]

Hi,

Finally had a chance to test the live CD :-)

First, I must say the result is quite good -- lots of apps, fast 
(impressive, considering it's a live CD !),
well integrated... It's really a good way of showing GNUstep.

Now... some (constructive) critics... :-)

First, some general remarks...

there's a lot of problems with booting this CD -- I know, it's 
apparently morphix's fault, but that's
really a shame... I had to try 3 computers before finding one that 
accept it :-/ (and no, not particularly
old computers...). It could perhaps be nice to use something else than 
Morphix ?

In the same way, I had an X problem on a laptop, but well, we can't do 
much about that I guess ...
The keyboard mapping was also quite strange (uk keyboard here..), and 
there wasn't any obvious way
to change that...

The fact that no "well known" web browser such as Firefox is included 
is imho a mistake -- there's a lot
of good docs on the web, and people should be able to access them 
easily. So as long as we don't have
a good GNUstep webbrowser, we really should include firefox (for 
example).

There's also no easy way to reboot from the livecd, which is also bad..
quitting X should reboot the computer imho.

On the GNUstep side, things are mostly ok; but there's something which 
is a big problem:
ProjectCenter doesn't work !!! quite bad for a live cd expressely 
branded as a development environment...
In fact, defaults write ProjectCenter BuildTool /usr/bin/make do the 
trick -- but it's a shame that this wasn't
even tested before the release !!! Second... there's a problem with 
the default Gorm file created by
ProjectCenter. I believe this problem is actually already solved, it 
would have been nice to include the right
version of PC :-(

Continuing with applications, GNUMail doesn't work either, which is a 
shame. In fact, the user needs to create
manually ~/Mailboxes and touch the Inbox,Sent,Draft boxes... Frankly, 
that's really bad -- doing so wouldn't
have been difficult :-/

And it's a really, really old version of GNUMail !

TalkSoup also has this very annoying bug with the scrollview, fixed in 
recent -gui release... waiting for recent
-gui package should have been perhaps a good idea :-)

Another "problem" is the lack of "demo" files. We've got theses nice 
applications like Cenon... and no examples !
They should have been bundled...

Finally, GWorkspace showed by default the dotfiles -- that's wrong, 
they should be hidden. And GWorkspace should
probably be started by default.

Some problems related to GNUstep, not specifically to the live CD :
Services behave a bit strangely, not in a really consistent way -- at 
least the ones from Terminal.app -- sometimes
they show, sometimes not... On a side note, there wasn't LaTeXService 
-- I thought it was included -- too bad it's a nice example of 
services ^_^

There was also the problem that some apps had their windows "outside" 
the screen. Actually, at the moment
the windows' positions are encoded in the gorm files... and imho 
that's a bit wrong ! with wmaker it's not that much
of a problem, because you can move the windows with alt-clicking... 
but that's only true if you know that trick :-)
Frankly, the windows' position shouldn't be encoded in Gorm; it's just 
wrong.

Another related problem (not specific to the live cd) is that apps 
save their windows position in the defaults
database -- that's good, but there's a slight problem: If the user 
change resolution to a lower one...
One solution, perhaps, would be to associate the positions with the 
actual resolution -- so you'd save the positions
for each resolution...

In summary... this live cd is very good, and things works quite well, 
but it's a shame that some simple
problems like the ones I described were not resolved before the 
release, while a simple test would have shown
them...

Two propositions:
- before releasing the next version, create a prerelease, inform the 
mailing list so people here can test it, and
then release it -- basically, a bit of testing here would have helped 
tremendously !
- a short "introduction" panel would be nice -- perhaps something as 
simple as running TextEdit with an introduction
text in it ... something to easily explain the UI and some basic 
concepts. Ideally, a real multimedia presentation
would be nice, but well, we would need an application for that ;-) (if 
anybody doesn't know what to do, that's
a good application idea, imho... ^_^)

Now.. on a "marketing" point of view, this release was well covered; 
we had news stories on the following sites:
- slashdot.org
- osnews.com
- linuxfr.org
- macslash.net
- rootpromt.org
- symlink.ch
- macnews.de

... which actually generated a lot of traffic on gnustep's site ;-) 
(http://www.gnustep.org/stats/)

Of course, as usual, people complained about the look of -gui and 
others had difficulties to grasp the power of
GNUstep and Gorm... but many comments were positive, quite a lot were 
impressed by Gorm (seeing the video demonstration), and all in all I 
think the results are really positive. I think it would be nice to 
continue submitting stories when we release something, because it will 
keep people aware of the project, and there is imho a lot of interest 
-- mac developers are interested (mainly by the windows version of 
course) even if many just dismissed GNUstep because, well, they 
already have a good OpenStep implementation on their hand ;-)
And lots of others were genuinely interested by an environment going 
in another direction than the usual Windows mimicking...

To sum up: This live CD is good, yet it can become better ;-) (don't 
forget it's a one-man job -- kudos to tarzeau !!)
Having a live CD is an excellent thing and we should take care of it 
-- it's a great demo/introduction tool for GNUstep.

Lots of people are interested in GNUstep, and now, we start to have 
something nice to use and develop with; I'm waiting
anxiously for EOModeler now ;-)

As one slashdotter put it, GNUstep is a project reaching is critical 
mass -- we have now nearly all the elements to build
and demonstrate a fantastic environment :-)

Kudos to all GNUstep devs, and thanks a lot gurkan for your hard work !

Cheers,

--
Nicolas Roard