Current talk from gnomedesktop.org

[Daniel Farrell <daniel farrells org>]

Here are recent posts by a couple of us on gnomedesktop.org about a
gnomeos...

Mine:

Man, tons of exciting things happening in Gnomeworld...

The desktop is getting to be world class and the apps are moving along
great... once we get stable G2 releases of the basic software there
isn't any reason an average joe couldn't live nicely in Gnomeworld...

I do think we need a community Gnome distribution though... one aimed at
the home user. Debian is the closest we have, but doesn't hit my
personal goals, which are as follows:

      * Gnome philosophy(make the right choice, not offer it as one of
        30 choices) from top to bottom and follows Gnome releases.
      * Integration(Gnome System Tools), integration(Red-carpet or
        workalike), INTEGRATION(Rendezvous compatible Zeroconf/mDNS)!!!!
      * Simple... only G2 software
      * It just works
Anyone else interested?

And a couple from Mark:

"Would you mind sharing your ideas about it? Anyone else can feel to
share what they have been thinking about this too." 

Well most of my ideas are on http://www.advogato.org/person/sisob/ 
and http://gnomesupport.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2339 

The general idea would be to fully integrate gnome with a dsitribution
in such a way that the user would never have to be faced with linux
internals if they don't want to. I want the operating system to fell
fast and integrated. 

One of the most important part of my idea is that it be a task based os.
Instead of saying "this app is cool lets include it" i'd say "we need
the os to do X so lets look at all the apps that do X, pick the best
one, include it and them out if they need it". 

Right now I'm thinking redhat 9.1 with gnome 2.4 and some Ximian mixed
in of possible debian or slackware/dropline. Yeah I know, none of that
is out but It'll be summer at least by the time I get to it. 

I've aready looked into how i could do it with readhat. It's quite easy
to customise the installer with new artwork, and remove packages that
aren't needed. 

There is a gnome-os list here
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-os/index.html - it looks totally
dead, so we could take that over. 

The biggest point of my plan is to extend the "just works" philosophy
from the desktop to the whole OS. 

MArk (sisob eircom net) 

If you have an more questions feel free to ask. 

Post 2:

Also it would need to use apt/urpmi/up3date/redcarpet or the dropline
update system ideally with a notification area applet telling you of
updates. 

I've been planning my own distro for years, 
but I'm too much a perfectionist to do it 
until gnome2 has matured a wee bit. 
eg. Rhythmbox and coaster need improvment. 

Also the new linux kernel should hold some 
great desktop related features and hopefully 
X development should take off soon. 

Also I think that we should not fork from the 
distro we choose to use. So if we start with 
redhat 9 and redhat 9.1 come out we 
upgrade our base distro to 9.1 to take 
advantage of new features and minimise 
our overhead. 

If anyone wants to discuss this in detail 
i suggest you join http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-os and
also read the archives. 

This needs to be done and it needs to be 
done well and as close to gnome.org as possible. 

MArk

Let's start the talk...  what do you guys think?

Dan