In my opinion, the weakest link with Demo LiveCDs now is how they are mostly devoid of media. You boot up a cool new Linux system, and you open up all these great programs (Rhythmbox, OpenOffice, Inkscape, etc.) and you stare at a blank page, or your empty song collection. Maybe you type a few words into OpenOffice or draw a rectangle or two in Inkscape. "Eh," you say, hardly impressed. What I'd like to see is a rich media experience in a LiveCD. I'd like to see at least one of each media file format in plain view when the user first logs in (so probably on the desktop or in a folder on the desktop). An MP3, a PDF, an OpenOffice text document, spreadsheet, and presentation, an SVG file, a movie trailer (or IBM Linux ad?), an image ripe for GIMPing. These also serve to demonstrate Nautilus' cool thumbnails, kind of like this: http://linuxadvocate.org/images/screenshots/gnome_nautilus_large.png When opened, each file would demonstrate cool features in the respective applications. And let's not miss any opportunity to use the content itself to talk-up Linux, GNOME, or the application they are looking at. It should be easy enough to find appropriate music, movie, and picture files. The ones with text will take the most work. I'm attaching a first draft of an OpenOffice Writer Example document. (I'm not entirely sure attachments work on this mailing list. If not, I'll post it on a website.) At once, the user learns about OO.o, why it's cool, and what it can do, while also SEEING many of the features on the page. Immediately, they are impressed by OO.o and also feel confident telling their friends about what OO.o can do, which would be less likely to happen if they had simply banged out a few letters into an empty page then closed the app. Well, that's the goal anyway. ;) It certainly could be improved. Please send comments on both the idea and the file. If anyone here is involved with a LiveCD project (Jeff?), I would like to hear whether they think this sort of things could happen. -Ian
Attachment:
OpenOffice_Writer_Example.sxw
Description: OpenOffice Writer document
