Yes! This is something that I would *very much* like to possess: A tool to help free people from Winworld, and in the process free myself from having to deal with M$tuff when people's window breaks...
Thank-you. Exactly what I was thinking. :-)
- A few things SuSE could develop: A special multimedia tutorial for newbies, a Windows TrueType font importer (that automatically mounts the Windows drive, finds c:\windows or c:\winnt, copies those fonts, and then makes fonts.dir and fonts.scale), and finally information on SuSE Personal and Profession for the newbie to upgrade to when they are ready.
To get this going, I would imagine that a capability to import mail/adressbooks from a windows system would help... (in the vein of the above: find windows-partition, locate mail/adr-book, import) not as simple as it sounds, I know, but still...
That'd be neat, and I'd bet it wouldn't be too hard - YaST2 already figure out which drive is windows so that it could be mounted. Simply make it mount it, search the standard spots MS places WAB (Windows Address Book), and then run a modified Kmailcvt to convert the e-mail and address book to something usable in Linux. Perhaps importing accounts settings from Outlook Express would be good too.
Also dual-boot should be *simple* to set up. (unless, of course, what we want is for people to abandon M$ completely ?)
Well, I doubt most people will abandon Windows all together no matter what. There are still things (like MS Publisher in my case) that aren't available in Linux.
Which leads to: some kind of partition management would be needed...
See my reply to David and Dallam.
- Elimate all of the Misc. hardware setup page, except bringing up a page to enter the phone number of an ISP. This page could have a button that said "Advanced: Setup DSL or Cable Modem Service." Other thing such as file and printer sharing could be taken care by creating a simple little "Home Networking Setup Tool", that would attempt to make samba setup as easy as smb networking setup is in Windows ME.
Definitely: make the whole network (modem/DSL/Samba) -stuffs department as easy as possible.
Right. I mean really, if the user has a NIC, YaST2 could automatically run DHCP to see if there was a DSL or Cable modem connection that it could detect and setup. And modem setup could be really easy - you just ask the user what the phone number of their ISP is.
Firewalling/NAT is a must, though. And setting that up ought to be simple, so that people will use it! Preferrably some graphic utility that makes for an easy initial setup, but later allows for a more finegrained control of stuff...
I'm pretty sure that RedHat 7.1 automatically sets up a firewall, SuSE could do something similar (really this would be a good thing in all versions of SuSE).
You're probably right about this, although I remember from booting my first Linux-install, watching in fascination (and a little disbelief) the machine actually *telling* me *exactly* what was going on during the boot! ;-D While I agree that a lot of people probably don't give a sh*t about all that, I still believe that showing system-messages at bootup is a good thing:
1: It conveys a sense of "real" computing.
2: It helps "debugging"
3: This is open-source: Showing people boot messages, helps convey the sense that your computer doesn't hide anything from you...(?)
So I would suggest:
a: Put the boot messages in a window (about 1/6 of the screensize, in the lower right-hand corner) on the startup-splash-screen
Yeah. You know, Caldera did a superb job of this (I think) in the copy of Linux Technology Preview I tried. It displayed all of the steps that needed to be done in a little graphical startup screen, and then checked them off, IIRC. It was pretty nifty, and looked "friendlier" than the standard bootup messages.
b: Make "Show boot-messages" optional
Definately. Personally, I think if SuSE developed a tool to cover up the messages, I'd include it with all versions of SuSE, but make it show more details in SuSE Personal and Professional. All versions should have an easy way to turn this off. -Tim -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy R. Butler Universal Networks Information Tech. Consultant Christian Web Services Since 1996 ICQ #12495932 AIM: Uninettm An Authorized IPSwitch Reseller tbutler@uninetsolutions.com http://www.uninetsolutions.com ============== "Information Powered by Innovation" ==============