The Next Shift


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The team is already hard at work on the next release of Shift Linux. The next version will be 0.6 and it will be based loosely on Ubuntu, with some customized theming and packages. We want to know: What would you like to see?

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If thinking of software in particular I'd like it to do just about everything out of the box and straight away that, say, Windows plus MS Office plus heaps of other programs people have to buy/add to get their systems into a respectable state.

So a more specific question here for me is what software types would people want out of the box?

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Wine. I think Shift should have Wine installed. Considering that Neowin is primarily Windows-centric, I would expect many users will want to use the software they are familiar with, regardless of the Linux equivalents. Provide links to Wine HQ in Firefox to help people get started with it.

Personally, I can live without Open Office, but I suppose it should be included just to round off the distro. Same for Evolution; I prefer good old Thunderbird, because my needs here are a lot simpler.

Ditch Rhythmbox in favour of Exaile in Gnome.

I find I always have to install gnome-obex-server to get bluetooth to work with my phone (for file transfers).

Deluge.

Bizarely, I don't think Scrot is installed by default in Ubuntu.

I'd love to see Firefox 3, but who knows when that will be ready. In the meantime, I always follow THIS GUIDE to make the wigets nicer. Could Shift set this up to begin with?

A folder in Home containing SVG versions of all the Shift logos and graphics. Hopefully someone could be inspired and use them to create a masterpiece.

Links in Firefox to:

Neowin (of course, especially this *nix sub forum), and the Shift Wiki.

Gnome-look, KDE-look, and a good site for Flux users. Again, a large part of this community love theming and skining, so being able to show how quick and easy it is to do this in Linux might prove worthwhile.

Ubuntu forums. Ultimately, if you've got a problem with Shift that can't be solved by the users here, Ubuntu forums should be your next stop.

The usual Firefox links.

Edit: Although Pidgin would seem like the obvious choice, personally I use aMSN, which again might be more paletable to Windows users. Also, I'm not sure if XChat comes with Ubuntu by default (possibly because Pidgin can do limited IRC stuff), if not, I suggest including it and possibly setting it up to with Neowin's IRC channel all ready to go.

Edited by Mr Fish
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May I substitute Deluge for Azureus as it is constantly unstable for me. It just freezes for me. Oh and please have Flash Player, Java, and the Gstreamer/FFMpeg codecs working out of the box because its just a pain for some people to get it. Finally for a music player, I think Banshee would also be better for some people since they might have an iPod and would like to sync from there rather than iTunes >.<

For iPod pictures, gpixpod works good too. For DVD creation, ManDVD seems viable so why not include that? Restricted drivers such as the nVidia, AMD/ATi, and Broadcom wireless should also be enabled out of the box to try out compiz and use wireless for some machines without the intel wifi chip.

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So a more specific question here for me is what software types would people want out of the box?

Well OpenOffice even though I can't stand it, something for burn files & audio cds & video dvds, something to play music / video (VLC media player), a gnutella client, a torrrent client, an ed2k client, a WLMail equivalent (thunderbird?), gimp even though I'm not a fan (something to replace paint.net anyways), an IM client. That's all I can think of right now.

I think upon first boot, the OS should prompt the user what browser they prefer: Firefox / Opera / Kmeleon etc. and download & install or set to default the appropriate one.

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^ Agreed about codecs and flash etc. Although it is relatively simple to install them yourself, it would be nice if you didn't have to.

What are Shift's thoughts about this? Ubuntu doesn't include some codecs because of legalities, yet other Ubuntu derivatives do...

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... the OS should prompt the user what browser they prefer: Firefox / Opera / Kmeleon etc. and download & install or set to default the appropriate one.

I second that.

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An idea would be to have different configurations from standard user (would install office apps, email, etc..), gamaing system (would try install video drivers *shudder*), developer (packages for compiling, LAMP?).

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Maybe a nice Dock by default?

AWN is a good dock program. AWN stands for Avant Window Navigator (not related to Avant Browser). It needs Compiz or Beryl though to work.

^ chAos972, I was thinking the same

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^ not necessarily true. awn will work with plain xcompmgr or any composite manager for that matter. it doesnt have to be the beast of compiz-fusion. personally i cannot stand awn but i still use it cause it's the best at what it does (from what i've seen)

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An idea would be to have different configurations from standard user (would install office apps, email, etc..), gamaing system (would try install video drivers *shudder*), developer (packages for compiling, LAMP?).

I like this :)

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Remember that whatever packages we use, we have to stay true to our GPL license commitment. If the user wants to add other programs or packages that are non-GPL, he / she will have to do so through Apt or Synaptic, with the appropriate repositories. That is easy enough to do........

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One request I have is for some one to fix the debian/ubuntu local account login change screen problem. This is going to hit Shift's Ubuntu core also. It affects both Kubuntu and Gnome based Ubuntu. Just thought might add this to the mix of improvements that should be looked at during the figure out shiftnets installed program suite they are going with .6.

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