Since the last time I tried out Paul Seelig's "wmlive" iso, it has moved from a Ubuntu Linux 11.04 base to a Debian Testing base with a bit of "unstable" and "stable" thrown in. I think this is a good decision on Paul's part.
I tried the iso in "live CD" mode on two desktop systems - a relatively new Lenovo ThinkCentre with Intel i7 CPU and an older Lenovo ThinkCentre with in Intel Core2-Duo CPU. Both ran the live CD (actually DVD) without any trouble and all of the applications worked well. I then installed wmlive-debian to HDD on the Core2-Duo machine. The installation was relatively quick (about 30 minutes) and went well with one very large exception - the Debian installer failure described below - which was solved, but poses a bit of a problem currently (read on to see why). The current release (wmlive-debian_20120225-amd64) has come a long way since the 0.68 release I used earlier this month. Paul is to be congratulated on taking significant steps to make an out-of-the-box Window Maker installation available to anyone interested. That having been said, I do have a few suggestions. Starting with the major installer issue, here are my suggestions: 1. The Debian installer fails at the grub2 installation phase. I believe Paul is working on the installer failure for the next upgrade. This failure really needs to be fixed. The installer failure is not especially hard to overcome if a user knows what he is doing, but for most users (even "intermediate" level users) this is just too difficult and too error-prone. Paul has a solution to the grub2 installation issue which has been included in one of the emails to this list and is also available here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/wmlive/files/README.txt/download Following Paul's instructions allowed me to complete the installation without any further difficulty, but again, this really needs to be fixed in the next release. Also, the instructions should be (IMHO) posted prominently on the SourceForge project site until the iso is updated or patched. 2. I suggest that the default browser (Firefox) should NOT be limited to opening on workspace 3 (Desk3). The Firefox appicon is pinned to the dock - which makes the application's icon visible on all workspaces - but by default Firefox opens only on Desk3. (BTW - after changing the icon and initial workspace attributes for Firefox to "nowhere in particular," the Firefox Download Manager still opened on Desk3 - I had to change its attributes as well so it would open on same workspace as Firefox). 3. Cut down on some (all?) of the addons and extensions installed in Firefox - let the user decide which, if any they want. I ran into some very unexpected behavior (difficulty starting downloads, for example, and inability to open a link on Google's search results screen) due to some of the addons / extensions installed. It took me a while to figure out which of these were causing difficulty and to disable them. 4. Check on the "APT::Default-Release "sid";" callout in /etc/apt/apt.conf. On my test machine, this prevents apt from successfully updating the package list no matter which package management approach is used (e.g., apt-get, aptitude, synaptic package manager). The error indicates that "sid" is not a recognized repository. I changed the callout from "sid" to "wheezy" and was able to run "aptitude update" and "aptitidue upgrade" with no issues. After this change, I was also able to install Libreoffice 3.4.5 from the testing (wheezy) repository. 5. For some reason, the user account was not added to the sudoers file. Running "visudo" and adding my user accouont fixed this, but it was a bit of a surprise. These are the things I ran into that I considered issues. As I said, only the grub2 configuration during installation is really serious, but the other issues are also things that I think need to be addressed. Probably 4 and 5 are the most significant. Thanks again, Paul, for putting wmlive-debian together and making it available. -- To unsubscribe, send mail to [email protected].
