[Fedora-spins] I need content for your spin's webpage- by Fri Oct 16

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Thu, Oct 08, 2009 at 14:47:04 -0400,
  Máirín Duffy <duffy at fedoraproject.org> wrote:

I am the current games spin maintainer.

> - A slogan for your spin to serve as the heading for the home page. The 
> sample one I came up for KDE is: "It's your desktop. Be free." If you 
> need helping coming up with one I'm happy to help.

I don't think I am a good slogan person. The goal of the spin is to be
a showcase for Fedora using games.

> - At least a paragraph describing what your spin is used for, who your 
> spin is for, what unique features it has - that kind of information. 
> This will also go on the home tab.

My vision of the games spin is that is a way to demo / showcase Fedora.
People can try it out and if they like some of the games they can install
Fedora and install even more games.

There isn't room for all of the games in Fedora to fit on a DVD. And because
it is a showcase, I wanted to not include any old game. I wanted to pick
the best representatives from various genres so that people are more likely
to find one they want. Once they have Fedora installed they can install all
of the games and go looking for more games. The spin is also based off the
desktop spin with wine excluded. (There isn't much point to wine on the
games spin, and it causes problems with bloat for the x86_64 version of
the spin if it is included.)

Playing off a DVD is too slow (to get started, once inside most games, play
is OK) to use on a regular basis. Saving games is also problematic. So I
don't envision people using the DVD for other than demoing and testing that
they can use 3D graphics on a system. Eventually it may make sense to have
some info on how to create a games spin on a USB drive with a way to save
games and to have a complete selection of games.

Some games in Fedora need third party data because the data is not free
(typically it's noncommercial use only). I have avoided putting these on
the spin, since having to download a hundred megabytes of data to play
a game isn't going to be a very positive experience for a demo.

3D games on the spin are also problematic. For F11 they probably didn't work
on any machines. For F12 they may work on machines with Intel and/or ATI cards.
(Very recently I have been able to run 3d games on ATI cards with some
crashes.) They are not going to work on machines with nvidia cards. There are
third party drivers (available from rpmfusion) that will allow these games
to work on more systems, but they can't be included in the spin. (I tried
including them in a custom spin and found that because of the way these
packages work, you can't usefully include them on the spin. About the best
you can do is set up the rpmfusion repositories so that installing them
later is easier.) Never the less I have included some 3D games on the games
spin, because they are popular. (And because they were on the spin before
I took over. The previous maintainer had a different vision for the spin
and it made more sense to include games that wouldn't run off the DVD, but
would once you had installed from it and had gotten 3rd party drivers
installed.)

In the future I am hoping to include more games (if lmza + squashfs combined
gets into the kernel allowing for better compression). I also want to do
a more detailed review of games (especially since 3D seems to be working
natively) to see if I want to want some big games or include additional
small ones. I also want to write up some QA test cases for the included games
while I am trying the games out.

The first paragraph is probably close to what you want, but for completeness
I wanted to provide more background about the spin. Since if you understand
it better, you might be able to better tweak the information provided to
new users.
 
> - A representative screenshot for your spin.

I think you could pick an interesting screen shot from any game in the
spin here. There are lots of possibilities and without some idea of
what kind of screen shot you want it's hard to suggest one.

> - For the downloads tab, if you'd like custom text to describe the spin 
> download, let me know. Otherwise I'll use the defaults in this mockup: 
> https://fedoraproject.org/w/uploads/c/ce/Spin-details-download.png

I don't have any special requirements here.

> - For the support tab, I'd like to know what IRC channels or other live 
> support options users have for your spin (if any), what mailing lists / 
> forums / non-live support options users have for your spin (if any), and 
> what documentation would you like to highlight to new users. An example 
> is shown here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/File:Spin-details-support.png

For the games spin, fedora-games-list at redhat.com,
fedora-spins at lists.fedoraproject.org and fedora-list at redhat.com are all
reasonable places to ask about aspects of the games spin. The games list
would probably be the best place to discuss what games should or should
not be on the games spin. The spins list would be for discussing generic
things about the spin that might apply to other spins. For general help
fedora-list is probably the best forum.

I don't generally hang out in IRC so the general places people might get
help with Fedora would be applicable.

> - Finally, I'd like to create some custom branding for each spin, so the 
> different spins pages are distinguishable from one another. You can see 
> in this KDE spin mockup, I did a bar above the tabs that has the KDE 
> logo. Let me know what kind of graphic you'd like for your spin ASAP and 
> I can come up with mockups: 
> https://fedoraproject.org/w/uploads/3/31/Spin-details-home.png

This isn't my area of expertise. I think whatever you pick is going to be
better than what I would come up with.