SEUL: First Impressions

[Jay Bloodworth <jay@pathways.sde.state.sc.us>]

Well, I've read through the first quarter or so of the list archives, and
the discussion I've seen this afternoon leads me to believe that nothing
has been set in stone, so I figure it's okay to dive in with my thoughts
and opinions, in $.02 increments.

$.02 I do think we ought to base SEUL on an existing distribution, rather
than reinventing the wheel.  Debian 1.3 looks like a strong canidate.  I
hope I will be able to install it on a machine at work sometime this week.

$.04 Is this End User Linux or standalone Linux?  The former implies to me
that we are in a LAN/workgroup/intranet environment, the latter that we
are sitting at home playing doom and surfing www.melrose-place.com.  I
don't mean to argue semantics or to imply that SEUL can't do both.  But I
think we should focus on a LAN evironment and deal early on with the
issues that brings up: DHCP, remote file systems, fascist administrtors,
etc.  A standalone/PPP configuration will be far easier to do as a subcase
of the LAN installation than the other way around.  I would especially
like to see SEUL and Linnet become to sides of the coin such that Linux
was all any organization needed to run on their network.

$.06 The archive contained a good bit of discussion about what kind of
user SEUL was targeted at, from clueless newbie to shy hacker.  I think
that's the wrong way to try and pin down the scope of SEUL.  We need to
look at what your average users espects to be able to do and target that.
Your average user expects to be able to run programs easily using a GUI.
He expects to be able to organize his files into directories and navigate
the directories using dialog boxes.  He expects that when he installs a
program, it will be added to a sensible place in the menu he uses to run
programs.  He expects to be able to select wallpaper and screensavers, and
to be able to make the computers say "T-t-t-t-t That's all folks" when he
exits a program.  You get the idea.  While I'd like to see SEUL utterly
embarass Windows95, the bulk of our efforts needs to be spent on making
Linux/X do the things that gotten use to Win95 doing.

Jay


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