Re: Cheap PC distro's

[Francis Cianfrocca <francis@tempest.com>]

Forget about letting a consumer touch the config. A mass-market consumer 
device is like a Norelco. You have to be able to plug it in and it will 
just *work*. Someone (perhaps he's reading this list right now) should 
make the clean o-bsd distro you're talking about (including X) and 
install it *before* it goes to WalMart.
Am I an idiot? Maybe. Am I taking the wrong drugs? Almost surely. Is 
this why every kitchen doesn't have a $200 web/email appliance? Yep.
This whole thread may be a don't-care. But look at the attribute-match 
here: o-bsd is well-known for security that you don't have to work hard 
to get, and for really simple config. That matches the low-end market. 
The mismatch is that we all think only smart people like us are 
qualified to understand Unix in the first place. That's the right 
attitude to have if you enjoy being marginal ;-) but I think all of us 
would like to see much wider use of o-bsd. (yes? no? maybe?)
-f

Telent wrote:

>>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