Date: Thu, 17 Apr 1997 17:53:43 -0300 (ADT) From: The Hermit Hacker <scrappy@hub.org> To: chat@freebsd.org Subject: Commercial, Non-Hacker CD Distribution - A thought Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.3.96.970417174010.4592e-100000@thelab.hub.org>
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Hi...
With all the talk about large corporations and whatnot that has
been going on, why not build a "Commercial FreeBSD" CD-rom?
Mainly, something that results in as brain dead of a Unix OS as
possible for end-users, something that I could give to my mother and tell
her to insert this into drive A and boot your computer...it will ask you
a few questions and then do the rest on its own.
Think of it this way...how much does MicroSloth charge for Windows95
nowadays? NT? What do you get with it? An OS, that's it, right? (I actually
don't know, haven't installed a MicroSloth system in several years)
What I'm thinking is that, for starters, we have a Unix based
Office product (StarOffice) that kinda works under our Linux Emulation. Why
not make a deal with them to come up with a FreeBSD port and offer to resell
it as part of a commercial FreeBSD CD. I don't know how much they charge
for their Commercial version, but considering they are just giving it away
for non-commercial use, you could probably work out a deal...hell, I'd even
buy a copy of StarOffice if they had a FreeBSD port...
So, wrap FreeBSD/StarOffice for FreeBSD into a CD as a start.
What else would be required? Wrap Netscape in with that, again, so
that its *already* intalled without having to go to the ports section and
dealing with that (we're talking *end-users* here!)
Isn't there a realaudio port for FreeBSD? what other commercial
quality products are out there that we could effectively make a *end-user*
CD distribution that is as plug-n-play as possible?
Hell, even kernel optimizations from GENERIC could be done in such
a way that its just a system tuning chore that happens in the background
and when complete, informs the user that a reboot is required to make the
new kernel active.
then we'd have the FreeBSD that we all know and love (source code)
and a FreeBSD that I could give to my mother and be relatively confident she'd
be able to actually make use of it. (ie. she doesn't need source or a ports
section)
*shrug* Just a thought...there is enough talent around here that
building up a User-Friendly GUI interface wouldn't/shouldn't be that
difficult...no?
Marc G. Fournier
Systems Administrator @ hub.org
primary: scrappy@hub.org secondary: scrappy@{freebsd|postgresql}.org
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