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...
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