[sword-devel] Re: Christian Debian distro talk / Report

[Pastor Ed B.]

Hello, everyone! Greetings in Jesus' mighty name!

I've been talking with Dave (my partner in the iXthus Project development), 
and we have some thoughts about IchthuX, and what could be done to streamline 
the project.

1) there are a LOT of extra packages from Knoppix in IchthuX that just don't 
really need to be there to meet our stated outreach goals. Looking at the 
overloaded KDE menu just makes me feel bloated. 

Can we *please* get rid of the development packages, the unnecessary editors 
(5 editors? how about just down to Kedit, Kate, and a text editor (I prefer 
nano over zile, easier for a newbie to use, but it doesn't matter THAT much - 
most newbies don't do console editing anyway).

2) During the HD install, the script has LILO as the default, but LILO is not 
nearly as flexible/recoverable as GRUB. Any chance we could switch the two?

3) Since this is going to be an OUTREACH tool that will be given to people who 
are unfamiliar with Linux, we should probably spend some time naming things 
so that non-Linux users won't get overly confused. For example:

In the KDE menu, what does KNOPPIX mean? Since I'm a fairly experienced Linux 
user, I know right away what it means. But what if we give this disk to 
someone who has never even SEEN Linux, let alone the KNOPPIX distro. It will 
just confuse them.

The entire KDE menu structure is WAY too complicated. It should be streamlined 
down to just a few menu entries, with organized submenus. I know this is 
possible, because the Multimedia menu is subdivided into Sound, Video, and 
Viewers. This is excellent - let's continue this all the way through and 
SIMPLIFY.

4) Raphael: excellent job on pre-configuring Xchat to have Christian Forums 
right up front. That is GREAT. Can you put a DESKTOP shortcut that says 
something like "Live Christian Chat" which links to Xchat?

5) The graphics. That little kid coloring book version of Jesus makes my skin 
crawl. Do we really want to portray our Lord as a cartoon character? I would 
much rather come up with something that looks a bit more professional and has 
our theme built into it. 

We could create a series of themes, and keep the cartoon Jesus picture for the 
kids, along with the excellent Everaldo Kids' Icon theme. But PLEASE - not 
for the default install.

6) Right now, it looks as if Raphael is doing the lion's share of the actual 
work on configuring the distro. Is there any way we could spread out this 
development process so that we could all work on the project?

Perhaps we could upload customized IchthuX packages to be included during the 
iso build process... all we need is a place to store them.