Attended a Novell Japan seminar some months back, and had a phone call today from someone seeking my suggestions. I suggested: (1) "make it easier to switch system and application language" (discussed below). After the discussion ended and I hung up, I had another idea: (2) "Personalizable kiosk" (like "roaming profiles" in Windows) (also discussed below). (1) I installed OpenSuSE 10.0 in Japanese then wanted to demonstrate it in English to a user group. After a lot of fiddling, I was able to switch both the system language and application menu language to English, but this irretrievably broke the date ( the date would take a random value every time the system was booted up ). It probably wouldn't take very much to make it possible to switch both system and application language (independent of the "locale" setting) among major languages like English French German Japanese Korean Chinese*. ( *Maybe the Chinese market is a low priority because of difficulty getting people to pay licensing/support fees... ;-) With Windows and other distros I don't think it's possible to switch both system menu language and application menu language. Only very large multinationals can purchase a multilingual version of Office from Microsoft -- however the system language still can't be switched. So this is potentially a huge advantage for an SuSE desktop over Windows. (2) When I visited a major city in another country I found a huge Internet Cafe with about 200 seats. They were running Windows 2000. When you paid in some money and set up an account, you got a customizable roaming desktop. You could sit down at any computer and log on to your desktop. I think that the reason that they were running Windows 2000 was to get around MS Office licensing issues. Incidentally, Skype was one of the applications being run. However -- thinking about it -- this is a similar situation to that in many big companies: some computers must be shared, and ideally the user interface ( both system and application interface ) should be customizable ( users should be able to switch system and application menus to their own language, and the system should remember user desktop preferences (and save any files that the user leaves on the system) and switch to the user's dektop when the user logs on ). So requirement (2) is a personalizable kiosk application like "roaming profiles" in Windows. I feel that these are potentially huge desktop markets which maybe only Novell is capable of filling... -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-usability+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-usability+help@opensuse.org