Fundraising versus functionality...
It seems to me that there is a certain percentage of people who are
happy to donate resources, including time and money. Facilitating
this by offering different options to donate is only part of the
equation, though. I think the more Slitaz gets promoted, the more
contributers we will get. However, we should need very little effort
if the product is one that "sells" itself. Unfortunately, we get a
lot of people who try Slitaz and move on becasue it doesn't work (even
though it should). The key issues here have been hardware support
(wireless and video), installation problems, and the availability of
software. Yesterday I found a few problems that will cost us users if
they're not fixed -- and no amount of fundraising will make up for
this.
1) As a tazpkg, linux-source no longer gets the source and
get-linux-source doesn't work. It was easy to work around using a
better receipt, but this has to be functional - we cannot force users
to use the tazwok way of building, this affects that, too, and in
order to be a GNU/Linux distribution, the source code must be
available and modifyable.
2) The nvidia package is outdated and the receipt is no longer valid.
I was able to build 260.19.44 using the proprietary installer, but
there must be an option for nvidia users who want direct rendering.
The xorg-xf86-video-nouveau driver doesn't exist in the repo, but
there are dependencies in mesa that require nouveau to be blacklisted,
anyway. And xorg-xf86-video-nv only supports 2D acceleration...
3) The get-flash-plugin fails, seems to be due to a change in Adobe's
download site, but this is important to fix.
4) Only openbox works from slim: ~/.config/slitaz/applications.conf
overrides the F1 key for switching. This also means only a command in
the window manager variable will work. It should also handle ob, or
openbox, not just openbox-session. This is important for setups that
require more than one startup command, and so that .xinitrc can handle
more than one window manager.
I understand there is strong focus on free and open source software,
but that doesn't change the fact that many sites use flash and some of
us have nvidia cards. The fact is, if these things aren't fixed for
the 4.0 release, we will hear about it for the next year. We will
also lose potential users... and whatever they might contribute. I
really believe in the do-what-you-love-and-the-money-will-follow
philosophy -- if we produce a superior liveCD, we'll have a superior
userbase, that many more people seeing the donate links who also like
Slitaz for it's superior functionality.
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SliTaz GNU/Linux Mailing list - http://www.slitaz.org/