Runa had posted about our travel in monsoon. A group of people from the Mumbai office were stuck at the beginning of the Eastern Express Highway at Sion from Tuesday (26th) 1900 hours till Wednesday (27th) till 0745. We decided to walk it out to Vikhroli (where Venky has judiciously bought a flat), had some tea and then went to respective places. That was a nearly 12km walk in belly deep water and pouring rain.

Currently, I am at Satish’s place – waiting for the time to go to office. 94.32 cms is the record rainfall in a single day eclipsing previous best of 83.43 at Cherrapunji during 1910.

By the way, this is being written using the Reliance connection which seems to be working ok.

marcus.bauer at gmail dot com writes that:

Creating a customized GNOME liveCD yourself is easy and takes just a
few minutes of time:

It involves three simple steps:

1. download and unpack http://project77.info/gnomelive/liveCD-0.2.tgz
2. ./make_livecd.sh en en_US
3. burn the resulting .iso onto a CD-ROM and enjoy!

You can customise in an effortless way:

* the default language
* background images (boot splash, gnome splash, desktop)
* add sample files to the Desktop
* add and remove packages

Linux and Audio Production: Simplicity Required

The second issue is usability. Multi-track tools are renowned for being complex to use. This complexity is not necessarily an issue with the concept of recording audio into tracks, but the issue of having the requisite knowledge to spit shine the track with EQ, dynamics an effects to get the best out if it. This knowledge sits outside of the application. The same can be said for IDE’s – creating a project in an IDE is fairly straightforward; the challenge lies with understanding the code – an entirely separate issue.

Hmm…here we go again. This time it is a rant about why we should attempt to make a localised desktop complete. So why is completeness important ? Or more precisely, why is this important now ?

In the light of the analysis of everyday incidents, and their very remarkable conclusions drawn in The Tipping Point – it is easy to see why a complete Linux desktop is in the offing. For a moment, just think about the wild upswing of Firefox. It started as a trickle and then slowly turned into rolling thunder gathering tremendous momentum along the way. Now that the initial spate has tapered off, a study of Firefox downloads might provide greater insight into the number of people upgrading Firefox. The upgrade part is important. Since each upgrade represents in some ways an incremental feature enhancement, the increasing usage of higher versions (for repeat consumers) would signify the need to have more feature creep into the software development model.

What would be the ideal desktop in any local language ? At any point in time this is a difficult question to answer. Currently more so than ever. Indic L10n shows remarkable maturity skew when it comes to desktop environments and the various development libraries. Choosing either GNOME or KDE immediately limits the number, type and user interface of applications one can have on the desktop. That said, both GNOME and KDE ship with a number of redundant applications, or applications which collectively make a lot of sense but fail individually in terms of feature value. The ideal localised desktop could aim to be modular in terms of applications. The concept is to replicate the stack model made popular by Senpai and Spikesource and extend it to the desktop space. A base set of applications which provide for comprehensive localisation would enable a lot more usage of it than one which provides an unstructured collection of applications.

What could be the basic stack of applications ? To begin with, one needs to look into providing the following: a user manager, a system services administration tool, a web browser (with plug-ins enabled), a ftp client, a mail client, a downloader program, an office suite, a task manager, basic games (card, strategy and the like), sound and video player and graphics tools. In a normal day, these are the applications a normal user would be more likely to use.

To begin with, one could make a list of the L10n status for each of these top-level categories so as to enable one to create a prototype desktop. A tentative plan for the same was unveiled as GRIND. Already GRIND has thrown up some interesting side tracks in the form of Senpai and the Koha stuff. One only has to wait and see how it goes further.

Asa Dotzler on firefox, cats, mars, and more: linux not ready for the desktop