Proposed announce for Independence 5.2.0.1

[jfm2@club-internet.fr]

Feel free to comment the following text.

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	     Announcing the Independence distribution.

Goals:
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Independence goal is to be a distribution aiming at solving the real
problems of the Linux user without feeling bound by traditions.
Making distributions who are a mockery of traditional Unix means
leading Linux the same place Unix went: being confined in a niche.  It
also means frustration for Linux users who, like home users and self
teaching people, happen to be out of the boundaries of traditional
Unix use.  It leads to misdesigns like assuming the box will be
running at 3am (not valid for home users) or assuming the user will
easily find the info (not valid for people self teaching).

We think Linux spreading Linux requires Linux becoming easier to use.
We think Linux spreading requires Linux being more suitable for its
users who are different from users of traditional Unixes: Linux has to
follow its own way.


Legal Status
============

The Independence distribution is licensed under the GPL.  It is
developped not for profit by a small group of volunteers.  Not for
profit means we don't ourselves distribute it on CDROM but we will
help anyone interested in doing it.  Small group means if you want to
contribute you will be greeted with open arms.

Features
========

-Independence is based on RedHat 5.2 with all the errata applied and
with stuff of our own

-Unsuitable networking clients specially for dial-up users, can make
the task of asking for help another ordeal while bad ouput quality in
postscript viewers can make many docs nearly unreadable by people who
cannot print.  Therefore we paid attention to make postscript viewers
default to quality output instead of speed and tryed to find
networking clients suitable for dial-up users, specially for people
with expensive connectivity.

-Of course we replaced traditional cron by one suitable both for
continuously and discontinuously operated boxes

-We applied to LILO something we will be eextending in future
realeases: having the info going to the user instead of the opposite.
In our case it means the Independence user knows how to get out of
trouble at boot time.

-Both KDE, fonts or font servers (we ship a True Type font server) and
special widgets like neXtaW can be installed transparently to the
user.  Just restart X and they will be there.  Uninstall them, restart
X and they will be gone.  The mechanism is clean and doesn't incur the
dangers of automatic editing.

-Linux should not only be for hackers.  It should be fun and
impressive for everyone.  We tried to include software for artistic
creation be it for graphics (Blender, Moonlight, POV, GIMP 1.0.2) or
sound.  Of course we added some games.

-Too many Linux users have to reboot Windows because their software
for real life runs on the wrong operating system.  Be it for using a
WYSYWYG word processor, managing a check book or a butterfly
collection we provided stuff for doing it under Linux, and to still
reduce the time under Windows we included Wine.


Bugs and shortcomings
=====================

-It is a test release

-The installation is the same than the one from the base distribution.
That means dial-up users don't get the same assistance than LAN users.

-We don't ship Gnome :-( nor Enlightenment :-(((

-We would have liked to include every known GIMP plugin under the sun.

-Restrictions for distributing the Glide libraries precluded the
inclusion of really good games.

-Some of the additional software is not at the latest version although
we try to be up to date on important or fast moving stuff.

-It is 2.0 based but a 2.2 upgrading kit is on a separate directory.

-Only a minimal part of our ideas are implemented



Future
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Next release will concentrate on including Gnome, on adding PPP
configuration at install time, on better handling of problems of
non-Americans (like LILO automatically using the right keyboard
tables) and in making XDM the default boot mode in a safe way.


Downloading and additional info.
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Go to http://independence.seul.org/distribution for additional info
about the distribution including downloading instructions


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