Wishlist and Future Work

If we are lucky enough, this project will have been a success - customers will allow us to install Linux on their new systems, and they will find the software useful. If the project is a wild success, customers will ask us to install Linux on their systems.

As the project matures, it could grow in many different ways. There are a number of improvements we would like to see, which we will outline in the sections below.

Support Improvements

Currently, only a handful of volunteers understand the Linux project well enough to help users out when they are stuck. At the very minimum more volunteers should become familiar with the installation process, and with answering frequent Linux-related questions.

Also important is technical knowledge of the backend. Currently only one on the team understands the FAI backend enough to make modifications. We need more people to become familiar with the installer's workings.

A third area in which we need to improve is in online support. People should be able to go online and ask questions that volunteers can answer. (The KWLUG website may be the answer to this, but people are still too afraid to ask questions.)

Technical Wishlist

If you are looking for a challenge, perhaps you could implement one of our wishlist items.

Better software:

As better versions of our existing software come out, we will probably want to upgrade it. One danger is that the packages we have chosen will bloat. In this case, we should be looking for alternatives.

We always want to be on the lookout for better software packages that are appropriate for our system. It would also be nice to recompile packages to make them leaner and meaner, but this is a lot of work to maintain.

Dual-booting:

Some people might want our configuration in addition to some other operating system. This challenge involves finding foolproof ways to program hard disk partitioning schemes that will preserve existing data on hard disks while allowing us to install our system on another partition automatically. The current installer wipes out the existing hard drive contents and repartitions it before installing Linux.

Better documentation:

We need to make our documentation available on local harddrives, and we need to make sure that users can access this information easily.

We also want to incorporate user experiences into our software, adding FAQs and tips to our documentation as we continue to learn about Linux and our user base.

Move documentation to docbook:

The docbook SGML DTD is quickly becoming the standard documentation format for Linux technical issues. At some point we will want to convert our L^ATEX documentation to SGML. L^ATEX is a nice input language, but it is ill-suited to producing HTML-ized documentation.

GNOME and KDE:

As newer computers come into the computer recycling project, we may eventually be able to install GNOME or KDE on some of our systems. This “challenge” may be as easy to solve as adding a Debian virtual package to a FAI package configuration file.

It is important to leave lower-end options available, though, because the computer recycling project is likely to get older computers for some time yet.

Better automation:

It would be nice to automatically detect hardware, then use that information to select packages and create configuration files automatically. Other distributions (such as Mandrake) can do this, so maybe we can too.

PCMCIA installs:

We have problems putting the distribution on notebook computers, because FAI does not currently support PCMCIA very well. Getting around this means changing FAI or using somebody else's modified version of FAI.

CD-ROM based installs:

Marc Shaeffer has been working on modifying FAI so that you can burn a CD-ROM that contains a FAI installer and the software it is going to install. This would be a neat thing to use in our project if we feel confident enough to move away from standard FAI.

If Shaeffer's changes get incorporated into the main FAI packages, then it would make a lot of sense to support a CD-based install.