Re: SEUL: Re: Berlin is openning up! YES!!!!!

[Erik Walthinsen <omega@aracnet.com>]

> "Help! my video card burned out.. all I could scrounge up is a CGA card..."
> I don't wan't to fource SEUL users without another option to use an
> unfamiliar command line enviornment, when most GUI widgets are easy to 
> represent with a character display.  Most users want some sort of safety
> net that doesn't scare the $%^&*& out of them.

Well, first thing is that our target end-user isn't going to know what a 
video card is, let alone be able to find a CGA card and put it in his 
system.  The normal user is going to look at a dead screen and call IS/
techsupt.  They promptly get their video card fixed/replaced and get on with 
work.  They aren't the type to kludge around it to keep working, they'd 
probably welcome the excuse to stop working!

My opinion is that we should only support ncurses for one thing - the 
installer - and that's only if we have to resort to text-mode because we 
can't probe the video card enough to get X running in at least some minimally 
useful graphics mode.

Also, I say that we should stick with one graphical interface - X or Berlin
(see my prev mail for opinions on berlin...).  My reasons for this:

As someone pointed out earlier today, we are dealing with the end-user, not a 
hacker-type.  As jfm2 said:

> You are not making a hackers distribution.  When planning for end
> users YOU must make choose what is good for them: if you force them to
> make choices, they will choose wrong and worse they will be confused,
> and when confused they will find SEUL is not simple at all.  Choose
> the best, give them only one possibility and try to make things
> install automatically.  That is the lemma when dealing with end users.

We need to do this for two reasons:

1) To define things for the end-user, who doesn't want to make these 
decisions: if dozens of high-iq people can't agree, how is Joe User going to 
decide?
2) Make it easier for us: less code to develop/maintain...

On the possiblity of supporting Windows/etc. somewhat: if there's a way to 
work it into the gui somehow, do so, but don't spend too much time working on 
it.  If it's not feasible, don't bother.  If we want to have a general 
interface for the installer, we can code a the installer with a small, 
frighteningly simple UI layer that sits on top of the main GUI, then write the
code *later* to glue that onto the top of Windows' graphics system.

Critiques welcome...

TTYAL,
     Omega

        Erik Walthinsen - Programmer, webmaster, 3D artist, etc.   __
  __                                                              / /\
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|    | M E G A  omega@aracnet.com         Home: (503)281-4281   / / /\ \
_\  /_          psu12113@odin.cc.pdx.edu  Majoring in CS       / / /\ \ \
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