Talk:Proposed Freekbox Changes

Argument for Ubuntu

Michael:

I saw your email to the Adoption-teachers list and thought I would immediately jump in here and throw in my thoughts.

Firstly, my recommendation would be to go with Ubuntu, all things considered but I want to go into why I say that in a little more depth.

I've been teaching the adoption class for about a year now (maybe a little longer) and one of the things that I see is we get a wide cross-section of user-students in the program. That said, we also see a lot of folks (particularly older people) who are toward the lower end as far as computer literacy and it is this group of folks (the computer illiterate or barely literate) people I'm thinking about. These are folks who, for the most part, don't want to be geeks. What they want, the reason they came to Freegeek in the first place, is to earn a computer that they can take home and use. They want to plug it in and have things *work*, more or less automagically. Now, most everyone reading this is going to know that it would be very difficult to give the users' that but I believe we can endeavor to make things *easier* for the user.

Debian is a great hacker's distro and that is precisely the weakness of it for our program. The folks who get the freekbox aren't necessarily hacker's and they don't *want* to be hackers. As much as that may be something that seems alien, it is still the truth that folks want to get their freekbox and take it home and then have a Windows-like experience without the Windows. If they pick-up a thumb drive, they want to plug it in and have it work. If they have a digital camera or an iPod they want to plug it in and have the magic happen and it works. They *might* be willing to do a little bit of twiddling and tweaking, I'm not saying that folks are looking for miracles but for your average end-user, the idea of hacking at, for instance, smb.conf does not equal crazy delicious fun. Now, for me, hacking smb.conf is a perfectly fine way to spend an evening but it's not for most of the folks who I have had the pleasure to teach in the last year.

We get them for three hours, folks. That's it. We can change the education model a bit and I'm hoping to work with Liane and Michael on expanding classes but the only class we can reasonably assure that they'll be at is the Adoption class and that means three hours and a bit of change. In that time, we need to give them enough to be able to take this machine home and do *enough* useful with it that they don't just get it home and treat it like a doorstop that can play mp3s.

Of the distros listed, I think that Ubuntu would be the way to go. Although I'm a SuSE bigot, I've installed Ubuntu and Kubuntu and played around with them on my desktop machine (and even had Kubuntu running on my laptop for about a week before I decided to just use SuSE and be done with it) and I'm very impressed from the point of view of looking at it from a teacher's eye. (And also from a hacker's eye but that's a different story.) The folks at Ubuntu seem to 'get it' that if Linux is ever going to move solidly into being an end-user operating system, it needs to be usable. Hardware recognition is a big deal for folks and users shouldn't have to huck their freekbox down to Freegeek when they buy that spiffy CD-RW from the Freegeek Store.

I would suggest staying with the KDE desktop environment. It's powerful and still basically very friendly to use. I also think it's more intelligently designed (again from an end-user perspective) than Gnome although I know that a lot of folks would disagre with me on this.

cheers Aj Davis

Ladyfractal

From this (and Michael's email) I get a few concrete tests we could take away:

1. thumb drive

   should be the same as the mass storage item - MW

2. digital camera
3. iPod

   anyone have one we can play with? - MW

4. automatic detection and mounting of mass storage devices

   works with both ubuntu and default sarge, but is only reliable in the gnome desktop

We should create a prototype of each of the three options and see how each performs on these tests. Maybe there are more things people want to try out. If so we can add tests. What I read in Michael's email, however, is that while our version of debian (the FreekBox) has some problems and Ubuntu has the advantage over it, it seems that a standard Debian install has also solved some of these problems. It'd be nice to know that we're jumping distros based on quantifiable differences rather than any fuzzy feeling any of us may have.

RfS 17:15, 11 Apr 2006 (PDT)

One argument for Debian

Sooner or later we'll grab a FreekBox off the shelf and throw it into place as an infrastructure box. When we do this, we could have a mixed network environment at Free Geek, the standard debian boxen we use on our servers, and an Ubuntu box with its different security model. This is less maintainable. Also not a very big issue, because we could have a standby debian system or two ready to go stashed somewhere awaiting this eventuality. RfS 17:15, 11 Apr 2006 (PDT)

Apples and Oranges

It is important to remember that we are not talking here about keeping the current freekbox3 but making sure that what we use fits our needs, our users needs. For example, the default Debian box has a networking tool with a check box to enable windows networking. Most of the administration can be accessed with graphical tools, just as in Ubuntu. In fact most of them appear identical to their counterparts in Ubuntu. I have a box set up in my office which people are welcome to try out. If something seems missing, I will see if it can be easily added, or if it is a real deficiency. I am willing to go along with whatever we decide, but lets do some real comparisons first, not remain stuck with our current concept of Freekbox3 versus Ubuntu. -- MW 17:38, 11 Apr 2006 (PDT)

My main wish in the immediate future is to get a clean list of the features and programs we need, from adoption, store, grant and infrastructure perspectives so that we can do a good side by side comparison. -- MW 17:42, 11 Apr 2006 (PDT)

Functional spec?

Michael:

Do we have a functional specification that I could look at? If I'm going to be at all involved in this process (and I would like to be) and if I'm going to be fair-minded (which I hope to be) then I need some kind of benchmark to work with so that I can be empirical. I understand eschewing the idea of jumping distros either just to jump them or because of some ill-defined criteria such as user-experience.

Cheers Aj

That is what we should be creating here, clear requirements that can be evaluated, such as Dave's "The user should never have to open a terminal". -- MW

Dapper Drake

If Ubuntu is in the mix, we should keep in mind that we are weeks away (June) from the next release. The next release is supposed to be an Enterprise release (I forget exactly how shuttleworth defines that, but it's intended to be some combination of stabler and more feature-rich, and have a longer support period, than Breezy or Hoary were.)

I believe the Drake has Firefox 1.5 also, which is a major improvement in my view.

Is anybody looking at the pre-release versions of this Dapper Drake?

-Pete 15:30, 12 Apr 2006 (PDT)

I'd be hesitant to base anything on a pre-release. We need stability. Sounds like several of the FB3 problems are partly there because we chose an then unstable release of debian to base it on.

Ubuntu's more rapid development schedule will likely mean a more up to date set of software, but might come at a cost of instability.

RfS 16:05, 12 Apr 2006 (PDT)

I think you're missing my point. Certainly, we don't want to DEPLOY a pre-release. But this particular release is a big focus of Ubuntu, with goals similar to ours: stability, long-term support.

The reason Ubuntu delayed the release 6 weeks (till June) is specifically because of the desire to release a final version that is more polished than previous Ubuntu releases.

From both a security and a usability standpoint, I feel strongly that Firefox 1.0.7 and earlier really oughtta be avoided.

Could you be more specific about usability issues? security-wise, debian backports most if not all security updates for firefox. ubuntu had major security flaws in firefox (i.e. "hijack your browser and make you see whatever we want" level security holes) months after they were fixed in debian. Vagrant 17:29, 13 Apr 2006 (PDT)

How soon are we looking to make a decision? If we need to decide before June, that would rule out Dapper Drake.

And, if there are FB3 issues that resulted from testing pre-release software, what were they? Do the same conditions apply here?

-Pete 17:02, 13 Apr 2006 (PDT)

One problem in the freekbox3 is the lack of automounting for USB drives and other added drives. When sarge was in testing, no automounting system really worked well, so we used autofs, which we had used in the freekbox2, but which requires additional configuration for any added drives. The current version of sarge seems to have a very good clean automounting system available, essentially the same as in Ubuntu. The same problem is unlikely to recur, but the problem with the second guessing these things is that it is hard to predict what will shake out in the transition from a testing to a stable release. Also, I very much agree with Vagrant's comment. We can use backports.org for programs like firefox MW 22:06, 13 Apr 2006 (PDT)