This is a very limited and egoistic attitude. Eigthy per
cent of the world population still has to work many months or
years to afford a computer that can run decently the majority
of modern, apparently "Free" software.
Many people who could afford a new computer every two years
rightly prefer to buy something else, like vacations, for
example.... Hardware should be changed only when it breaks, or
when the user's needs increase a lot (for example when one
starts to do video editing). Not because "Free" Software
requires more and more expensive hardware every year.
Of course. By all means, let's keep things in the right
perspective, and do whatever we can to guarantee survival
first.
Don't forget, however, that:
software which doesn't force you to hardware upgrades
leaves more money for donations.
in the long run, these people need to become self sufficient,
i.e. able to make a decent living by themselves. For better or
for worse, in modern world this almost always requires
computing. If you teach a man to fish he'll never be hungry
again.. unless the only useable fishing rods are too
expensive.
We (the project founders) don't have enough time and skills
Good, optimized distributions already exist, even if most of them
are de facto reserved to people with enough time and skills to
build everything from scratch, or compile and upgrade manually all
their packages.
. We feel that the mainstream distributions, those already well
tested and with plenty of available documentation and precompiled
packages, are exactly those who should be useable without forcing
people to buy unnecessarily powerful hardware.
Many of the reasons for the problems we want to solve are more
a consequence of misguided programming (as in "done thinking
only to powerful new computers", not "low quality") than of
the "limits" of this or that distro. Consequently, much of our
activity will be about:
find which program has the best feature to HW needs ratio for a
particular task.
Help to clean some code so that it doesnt' force you to copy on
disk three different 100 MB library packages when it really needs
only ten per cent of each.
configure it to achieve the maximum functionality on a per
user basis, i.e. placing in the home directory of each user,
at the end of installation, .rc files much more powerful than
the default ones.
All this eventually benefits all GNU/Linux distributions. In
short, regardless of what you are using now, you are welcome
to port what we do to your favourite distribution, join our
lists, suggest neat tricks, help as explained below, or just
drop by now and then..
We are an independent group of Red Hat users, and started this
of our initiative. However, we hope to cooperate as much as
possible with Red Hat, so that this project eventually does
merge into the standard distribution, for all the reasons
explained above.
Why should we? We do want xinetd, iptables firewalling,
journaling file systems, secure SMTP and print server and so
on, all compiled with modern libraries. In the user space, for
example, we also want to print color with the latest
Postscript drivers.
This a perfectly legitimate question, since there are many,
many such machines lying around, unable to support modern
software. Unfortunately, we have no resources for this. It
would be a much, MUCH bigger task, considering that some of
those platforms have never been supported by Red Hat in the
past. We are focusing on adding a new install option to Red
Hat for x86 hardware, because it does cover a lot of old
computers, and it's all we can realistically think to do.
Of course, we encourage and wish every success to projects
attempting to do the same things as RULE on other platforms,
and welcome every possible cooperation (exchanging
informations, system setup scripts, whatever)
if you already made a heavily customized Red Hat install, please
join us, or, if you don't have time now, send us all the relevant
files.
signalling interesting applications (see our Package selection
criteria and package list)
providing smart configuration files which add real functionality
without forcing the user to upgrade to a much heavier application.
Example: how do I get automatic paragraph numbering with standard
emacs or vim? Do I really need to go to an office suite just for
that?
o testing the installer doesn't require any specific skills.
If you have an old computer, just download our
rule_test_form.txt
, fill it up with the computer data, and send it as plain text
to our testing coordinator (Benoit Mortier benoit . mortier At
opensides dot be). Af ter that, just download the installer
following Benoit's instructions, and report to him whatever
happens.
Contact your local LUG, and ask them to help youi and/on
the project as explained above
Submit to "linuxdesk at inwind dot it" any requirement you
might have as a RULE end user. For example, if you are a
teacher, submit any Free Software program you know usefule for
educational or teacher support purposes.
Copyright 2000/2002 Marco Fioretti, linuxdesk at inwind dot it. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2002 The RULE project. All Rights Reserved.
Generated on 2002/06/10 5:21:29 UTC
