Re: Gnome is a problem for OEMs

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Tue, 2006-04-11 at 17:34 +0100, Daniel Carrera wrote:
> Hello Andrew,
> 
> > I am glad to learn that you want to support Linux on the PCs that you sell.
> 
> :)
> 
> > Sabayon is one piece of software that is designed to do the 
> > configuration you want on a single PC.
> 
> I'll try anything. I do want this to work. I downloaded Sabayon but I 
> couldn't compile it. The configure step fails with:
> 
> checking for XLIB_MODULE... configure: error: Package requirements 
> (gdk-x11-2.0 pygobject-2.0) were not met.
> 
> But even if I *could* compile it, I wouldn't want to install a full 
> development environment on a computer intended for an end-user. I guess 
> I could remove all the -dev packages afterwards, but if I have to do all 
> this on every PC the labour cost per PC will go out the roof.

Sabayon helps you create configurations, both default and mandatory.
It's not a run-time source of configuration data, so there's really
no need for it to be running on all end-user machines.  Everything
Sabayon does, you could do by hand with considerably more effort.

The idea is that you would use Sabayon to create the configuration
data for the default desktop you want, and then use that on the
end-user machines.

As an analogy, users don't need emacs installed for their apps to
use config files, even if you created the files in emacs.

I have no doubt that there are OEM issues that Gnome can't handle
currently, but the things you've described are possible.  What's
lacking is our administrator/OEM documentation.

--
Shaun