Hello Bill, as you can see, Window Maker Live is indeed a moving target, and a fair share of breakage and enhancements is to be anticipated. ;)
On 02/28/2012 08:44 PM, Bill Nance wrote: > > 1. The Debian installer fails at the grub2 installation phase. [ ... ] > 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. > Fully agreed. Nonetheless, i am not sure yet how to fix that on my own, but will at least provide a script to automatize these actually rather repetitive steps for people who lack the knowledge to work around these issues. With some basic reading comprehension, running these scripts should hopefully be no issue even for less experienced users. > 2. I suggest that the default browser (Firefox) should NOT be > limited to opening on workspace 3 (Desk3). Most probably i will remove all predefined settings in this very regard. Just because i do prefer to automatically distribute any opening window over multiple desktops right from the start, doesn't mean that everybody immediately likes it according to my own personal preferences, especially if he still doesn't know how to turn it off. > 3. Cut down on some (all?) of the addons and extensions installed in > Firefox - let the user decide which, if any they want. > I guess you primarily stumbled over the combined power of the privacy extensions NoScript and RequestPolicy, which are very restrictive right from the start, right? ;) I personally consider both Firefox (or any other browser), and also Thunderbird, to be not really usable without at least some of these extensions (noscript and adblock in first place). While some addons might be subject for discussion, removing all of them is definitely out of question. Furthermore, an important prerequisite for Window Maker Live is to actually have such preconfigurations already in place. We still need to find a more suitable balance, though. If people don't have browser addon configurations already performed in advance, they most likely will never know that they would want it if the knew about them out of their very own experience. So we have to provide experience instead of only links and advice. Just looking around among my non IT knowledgeable friends and family shows me that lots of grieve could be saved, if users wouldn't need to be bothered to search for solutions that should already be in place, and which they simply only don't know that they actually exist. On the other hand, too much of a good thing can easily result in the opposite. Therefore i will reassess my assumptions and try to strip down these extensions to a more reasonable limit. Maybe i should just keep them installed, with some of the more intrusive ones being preliminary disabled, so the user can decide to either turn it on or just remove it. I will have to think about this a little bit. > 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. > Something unexpected went wrong then. As i have also seen this in my latest compilation myself, I am already trying to track this down and find a fix. > 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. > Issue is already know and fixed. The next release will just work as expected in this regard. > Thanks again, Paul, for putting wmlive-debian together and making it > available. > Thanks again for this fantastic review which, like the one you already sent for the former release, helps to point me into the right direction. Said that, i have already uploaded wmlive-debian_20120228-amd64.iso to the sourceforge website, which does address the above mentioned sudo issue, and features a few further enhancements under the hood. While the failing grub installation issue still remains unchanged, there have also been some visual enhancements to the installer, which is showing now a "Window Maker Live" banner and logo instead of the standard Debian one. This was the only eye candy i was prepared to invest at least some time in. Also i removed the very useful davmail package, which was the culprit for inflating the ISO size by sucking in a huge amount of java related packages which were of no use for anything else. Furthermore, i added a routine to find and replace duplicate files with hard links (using the fdupes program) in the package documentation directories, which helped quite a bit to reduce storage requirements. So, finally, the ISO image should fit again on standard CD media, and the older ISO version will be pulled from distribution any time soon. If you are patient enough to wait at least one or two days more for the download, then a more recent version might already contain the fixes for the problems addressed in this review. ;) Since i already received some mails in this regard, please accept my apologies for not providing a 32bit version of the ISO anymore. in fact, i tried to create one, but as the debian installer for some reason doesn't compile in 32bit for me, i abandoned this effort due to the extra amount of time it would require. So, for the future, Window Maker Live will be 64bit only. Unless someone else steps up to create a 32bit release version, naturally. That's what the source is provided for, as i simply can't do it all on my own in my unpaid free time. I was also thinking about packaging all the customization scripts and preconfigurations separately, so that no full ISO download would be required just to take advantage of the Window Maker customization part. That could also possibly serve as a basis for an enhanced wmaker-common debian package? Thanks a lot for your interest! Best regards, Paul -- http://sourceforge.net/projects/wmlive -- To unsubscribe, send mail to [email protected].
