Re: Cheap PC distro's

[Telent <telent@mordac.info>]

> I'm thinking of buying one of these as a Christmas gift for my little
> munchkin:
> 
> http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/ptech/12/05/sproject.hs02.cheap.pc.reut/index.html
> 
> Since this hardware is a known quanity, it'd be interesting to cobble 
> together a consumer grade BSD distro with all the goodies enabled
> (provided it will run on this toaster).  Do any of you folks that
> routinely set up OpenBSD desktops for average users have raw material
> of this nature?

I've read through the remainder of the replies to this topic, but
couldn't resist putting my two cents in.

Personally, I use OpenBSD on my desktop.  I do word processing, graphic
design, mail, web, IRC/AIM, music/DVD's, 3D modelling, and whatever else
comes to mind on a certain day/certain whim.

Word processing is easily covered by AbiWord (which, btw, Word users
feel perfectly comfortable with); on the rare occasion that someone I've
not trained sends me a Word document, it imports perfectly.  Most of the
time, though, I just boot up Beaver the tabbed text editor, or trusty
ol' vi.

Graphic design... The GIMP is not a very friendly program, but it's easy
enough to figure out for basic usage.  Good enough for me, at least, not
that I'm a high-powered graphic artist, but when you look at it compared
to Paint, it blows it away.

Mail is covered by Sylpheed; I used to be an Outlook fan and am in fact
certified in that subject (not that certs matter).  Sylpheed blows that,
too, away, both on speed *and* common sense/usability.  If you have an
Outlook freak or someone who wants a more powerful program, Evolution
the Outlook clone is in ports, thanks to the ever-wonderful Marc Matteo.

Web... This is a bit of a touchy subject.  I've tried Konqueror-embedded
(too slow... fifteen second startup times, ugh), Netscape-linux (even
slower), Mozilla (bloated monster that seemed to crash every few
seconds), Opera (just didn't like the interface), and Links/Lynx (nice,
but I read webcomics.)

In the end, I settled on Dillo, which is blazing-fast and very stable. 
Unfortunately, it doesn't support SSL, Flash, frames, or Javascript. 
Equally unfortunately, you can't set handlers for other protocols than
HTTP, it requires STRINGENT HTML (unlike 99% of the sites out there) or
it looks awful, and the bookmarks support is clumsy at best.  

For the times when I need $FANCY_WEB_TECHNOLOGY to work, I use the BSDi
version of Netscape.  With the Flash plugin, that supports Flash, but
unfortunately interactivity seems not to work, much to my displeasure
when I found the UserFriendly mail admin game.  Oh, well... that could
be considered a feature, I suppose; kept me from wasting countless
hours.

IRC is covered by X-Chat, which is, hands-down, the best graphical IRC
client I've ever used of any platform, and gaim handles any moments when
I need another protocol, like AIM.

Music-wise, XMMS and cdio handle anything I need (with the prettiest GUI
I've ever seen on any media player, for XMMS), and for DVD's, I've never
had any problems with Ogle.

And Blender and Moonlight do me well for my 3D modelling activities.  

There are a few things that would be nice, like a functional WINE port
for using proprietary, private Windows-only applications, and some
hardware support for digital cameras, webcams, and the like... but...
since I don't have the skills to beat a current port of WINE into shape
nor the money to send Theo a piece of every hardware I want working, I
live with it.

As for the idea of a consumer-grade distro based on OpenBSD...

I've toyed with the idea in the past.  It would be easy enough to cobble
together a CD for i386 that boots, nukes anything on the disk,
auto-partitions, and installs various desktop packages, perhaps giving a
choice for a more advanced installation ("What window manager would you
like to install?  Press 1 for Enlightenment, 2 for IceWM, 3 for
AfterStep, or hit enter for the default of Enlightenment"), but the
issue of the X configuration has always pulled me up short.  

XFree86 4.2.0's autoconfigure is just not there.  I tried it earlier and
didn't end up with a working config file -- I had to edit it manually. 
Perhaps 4.3.0's will be a huge step ahead, but I'm not holding my
breath.  I know a bit of shell scripting and have played with the "roll
your own release" steps of OpenBSD enough to be able to hack the sets
into something better for an average user desktop, but actively changing
the code of a monolith like XFree86 is way beyond me.  The interest is
there, but not the talent.

-Sunny Raspet