J_K9 @ Linux

Linux on Dell: Get Voting!

It appears that Dell have taken the community’s request for Linux on Dell computers seriously and have now set up a survey to discover what exactly its customers “want from a Linux desktop,” in the words of Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, who blogged about this survey yesterday.

From the Dell blog post announcing this survey:

Your feedback on Dell IdeaStorm has been astounding. Thank you! We hear your requests for desktops and notebooks with Linux. We’re crafting product offerings in response, but we’d like a little more direct feedback from you: your preferences, your desires. We recognize some people prefer notebooks over desktops, high-end models over value models, your favorite Linux distribution, telephone-based support over community-based support, and so on. We can’t offer everything (all systems, all distributions, all support options), so we’ve crafted a survey to let you help us prioritize what we should deliver for you.

Get voting!

By the way, I also recommend you take a look at the announcement on Dell’s blog - few times have I seen that many comments in reply to a post

MiraGroupware.org: Registered And Ready

Mira Groupware, an Open Source alternative to Groove, now has its very own website which will be its centre of information and development. There you will find Mira’s forum, documentation wiki and hopefully some more community-orientated services in the near future. A nice touch is that MiraGroupware.org will change colour as it progresses through the stages of development: Planning, Alpha, Beta, Pre-Release and Stable, so do keep an eye out for that.

The Planning stage is arguably the most important stage of Mira’s development. It’s where both you and I get to decide what features are implemented by default, how Mira operates, how scalable it will be, how you would like to use it, how you would like it to look and discuss everything relating to its architecture and design. For this reason I encourage you to post what you want Mira to be like in Mira’s forum, so that the developers may consider as many ideas as possible and thus set out the blueprints for the future versions of Mira, and indeed the first.

User interface mockups, such as the one above, are also welcome, as we may then decide which interface is the easiest to use and is also visually appealing so that Mira does not become a bore to operate. It should have a professional look, but it shouldn’t be too dull either.

I have high hopes for Mira, as do others, and I’m sincerely hoping that our efforts will pay off and that, perhaps in a few months or years, you will have an Open Source alternative to Groove which is more scalable, more powerful and more complete than the competition on your desktop.