[Hamara-devel] Sugam on Debian and the about page.

[shirish शिरीष]

in-line :-

On 3/25/15, shantanu at hamaralinux.org <shantanu at hamaralinux.org> wrote:

> 1.) Installer : Debian is said to be a developer-first Linux
> distribution. Although it is robust, secure and powerful, it isn’t
> exactly designed for those new to Linux. The developer community has
> worked tirelessly in the last few years to make the installation process
> and basic setup easier, but it is still leaps and bounds away from
> Ubuntu’s usability as far as installer is concerned. We need to work on
> this part and see how we can improve the installer.

That's debian-installer and task-selector for you. While I agree we
need to improve the debian-installer rather than ubiquity. The reason
are multiple. The single-biggest reason would be multi-lingual and d-i
tied with lot of other softwares which is and can be generated in case
an installation happened or not.

I know that ubiquity was broken (on the design front-end as well as
the multi-lingual part for many years.) Debian-installer scores points
on both the multi-lingual front as well as accessibility from the word
go. It works with Orca (for people with low-vision or blind) from the
word go.  How the situation is with ubiquity now have no idea, do
accept the argument that d-i needs to be more user-friendly.  The
package was updated/upgraded just a few days ago.

[$] apt-cache policy debian-installer
debian-installer:
  Installed: 20150324
  Candidate: 20150324
  Version table:
 *** 20150324 0
          1 http://http.debian.net/debian/ unstable/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     20150107 0
        600 http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ jessie/main amd64 Packages

If one wanted to do improve debian-installer they wouldn't have to go
far to find more about it.

[$] dpkg -L debian-installer | grep TODO
/usr/share/doc/debian-installer/TODO.gz

just going to the appropriate directory and doing a zcat gives you that.

[/usr/share/doc/debian-installer]
└─[$] zcat TODO.gz | less

There are number of issues or things which would benefit debian as
well as any debian-derivative. Which would be good for us or we would
like to work on is upto us. If you want to try to improve the g-i
(graphical installer) you are welcome to try that or any of the
low-level plumbing stuff that joeyh, Didier, Raphael, Karsten and
others in debian-boot are working on. The rest is upto all of us what
interests us. People on #debian-boot are pretty approachable.


> 2.) Desktop/UI : This is really an important part and the general
> conception is that ubuntu has got an edge here because of their "Unity"
> thing. However using gnome for a long time my personal preference is
> gnome over unity. I am not sure about a new user though if they would
> like gnome/unity/kde/xfce/lxde/whatever. May be we can provide multiple
> desktop environment with simple switch option in the OS ??

This already works. I have 6-7 desktop managers on my system and on
the gdm-login screen I can choose which one I want to use for that
session. Although I have become regressive and been using mate for
over couple of years now, it has pretty simple look without need for
cherry-picking things, although do still hang on some components from
GNOME (mainly nautilus) but that is personal perspective. Lot of
people are happy with caja as well.

> 3.) Software Availability : I have heard Ubunt has got thousand of
> softwares in their repository. Does debian lacks here ? Need to check
> this.

I think you have got it backwards here. Debian has a much larger
repository of software than Ubuntu has. Ubuntu has a smaller archive.
One can simply do :-

wget http://packages.debian.org/$RELEASE/allpackages?format=txt.gz

and then rename the .txt.gz , extract and then simply do a listing
(just -6 from each listing).

─[$] wc -l stable_allpackages.txt sid-allpackages.txt
experimental_allpackages.txt
   48564 stable_allpackages.txt
   68740 sid-allpackages.txt
   21654 experimental_allpackages.txt

I am sure you could do with a shell script more elegantly but this was
just for doing it.

You can also do a similar thing for Ubuntu and see if there are any
differences or not or I am making things from air :)

You could make/download a full Debian mirror, how much to mirror and
what to mirror is totally upto you.

See https://www.debian.org/mirror/ftpmirror and
https://www.debian.org/mirror/size to have an estimate on the sizes
given. Don't take the numbers given there as the absolutes but more
like a sort of figure to start with, that page is around 6 months back
so have a slack of around 10-20% to have the full archive (whether to
have a single architecture or multiple is again upto you.)

I do remember a friend downloading a BD-ROM during lenny and people
making couple of BD-Rom sets during the wheezy cycle as well.

> 4.) Package Manager : We can't/shouldn't expect everyone to run "sudo
> apt-get bla bla bla". We need a good package manager for hamara. Not
> sure how good package manage debian has got ? Anyone wants to confirm ?

There are a quite few package managers like aptitude-gtk, kpackagekit
or aptitude-qt, synaptic, kpackagekit and few others I haven't tried
them out recently.

I use mainly apt and aptitude but that's it.

Ubuntu's Software-center was also packaged for sometime but it was
removed as there were issues and upstream didn't make any effort to
maintain and fix the issues recovered.

See https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=729080 . AFAI
remember the issue is because of Ubuntu/Canonical's dislike of GNOME 3
and for a long-time they refused to touch anything which linked to any
GNOME/GTK libraries, ironically though lot of Unity's stuff is
copied/*inspired* form GNOME 3/GNOME Shell itself .

> The another topic being discussed in the thread is about hamara website
> about-page I GUESS? Sorry guys but I couldn't really understand the
> points there :(

The thing mainly being discussed is why we are doing, what we are doing.

Of the discussions two main things which GNU/Linux has not done much far is :-

a. Localization - Part of the problem is that we just don't have
enough heads and unlike other Operating Systems, this is a volunteer
project and even then GNU/Linux trails in localization in most
projects. So improving localization for any package is a win-win for
all irrespective of whatever distribution it is.

b. A build for EDA people - There is no such dedicated build for
people who want to use FOSS tools for EDA background. If we can make a
build for such people would be nice and it has lot of potential. See
http://blends.debian.org/ for similar initiatives and ideas. The idea
being the user doesn't have to manually install whatever packages are
needed. It's also possible to have pre-defined configurations for
specific users and use-cases as well but that would when we are into
it quite a bit.

I hope that explains all.

> Thanks
> Shantanu

-- 
          Regards,
          Shirish Agarwal  शिरीष अग्रवाल
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