Fedora on Netbooks (Was: Re: Reminder: Meeting in 24 hours, #fedora-meeting)

[Mathieu Bridon]

>  The last event that I attended, I got a bunch of questions regarding
> Fedora
>  usage on various "netbooks".
>
>  I believe that this is a marketing problem more than it is an engineering
>  problem, because we have a variety of Fedora spins (including the default
>  one) that would work fine on Netbooks.
>
>  I think we need a simple page -- /wiki/Netbooks -- that offers some best
>  practices/tips/troubleshooting/etc. for people who are using Fedora on
>  different Netbooks. 
I also had a lot of these questions at LSM. It turned out people were
more looking for a spin dedicated to netbooks (see UNR), they didn't
really want to know that Gnome runs perfectly fine with a small
display.

Last time I checked, we didn't have such a dedicated desktop
environment in our repositories, did I miss something ?


----------

Mathieu Bridon (bochecha)

[Paul W. Frields]

On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 09:10:00PM +0200, Mathieu Bridon (bochecha) wrote:
>  > The last event that I attended, I got a bunch of questions
> regarding Fedora
>  > usage on various "netbooks".
>  >
>  > I believe that this is a marketing problem more than it is an engineering
>  > problem, because we have a variety of Fedora spins (including the default
>  > one) that would work fine on Netbooks.
>  >
>  > I think we need a simple page -- /wiki/Netbooks -- that offers some best
>  > practices/tips/troubleshooting/etc. for people who are using Fedora on
>  > different Netbooks.
>  
>  I also had a lot of these questions at LSM. It turned out people were
>  more looking for a spin dedicated to netbooks (see UNR), they didn't
>  really want to know that Gnome runs perfectly fine with a small
>  display.
>  
>  Last time I checked, we didn't have such a dedicated desktop
>  environment in our repositories, did I miss something ? 
This is a great point Mathieu.  As a matter of fact, one of the calls
I got about Fedora 11 on a netbook was from a certain prominent
executive, who installed it on his HP 2133 and said it was the first
distro of any kind where he could read the screen properly.

Not having a netbook, I'm wondering where currently our user
experience suffers, and where we can do better -- although that's not
really a Marketing topic per se.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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[inode0]

On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 2:51 PM, Paul W. Frields<stickster(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>  Not having a netbook, I'm wondering where currently our user
>  experience suffers, and where we can do better -- although that's not
>  really a Marketing topic per se. 
> From my experience with Dell and HP netbooks the problems are mostly
the kind we can't fix easily. Like unfortunate choices for wireless
hardware. Some Xorg issues seem pretty common as well.

Once you get things up and running the only issue that I see from time
to time is a dialog box that doesn't fit on the display and that won't
resize making it darn near impossible to hit buttons and, well, it is
sort of a crapshoot when you can't see what the buttons say anyway.

John

[Jef Spaleta]

On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 11:51 AM, Paul W. Frields<stickster(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>  This is a great point Mathieu.  As a matter of fact, one of the
> calls
>  I got about Fedora 11 on a netbook was from a certain prominent
>  executive, who installed it on his HP 2133 and said it was the first
>  distro of any kind where he could read the screen properly. 
Perhaps we are just lucky there and it has more to say about the
usability sacrifices of a 9 inch screen  Displays are getting bigger
and bigger with each model release. The HP 2140 and Dell Mini 10v now
has a 10 inch screens.

-jef

[Paul W. Frields]

On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 12:40:12PM -0800, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
>  On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 11:51 AM, Paul W.
> Frields<stickster(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>  > This is a great point Mathieu.  As a matter of fact, one of the calls
>  > I got about Fedora 11 on a netbook was from a certain prominent
>  > executive, who installed it on his HP 2133 and said it was the first
>  > distro of any kind where he could read the screen properly.
>  
>  Perhaps we are just lucky there and it has more to say about the
>  usability sacrifices of a 9 inch screen  Displays are getting bigger
>  and bigger with each model release. The HP 2140 and Dell Mini 10v now
>  has a 10 inch screens. 
Let's see if we can get this discussion either moved to a relevant
list, or captured somewhere that we can use in showing how well Fedora
works on netbooks.  My comment was more of an aside -- trying to make
the point that I'm not sure we know how well we're doing on netbooks
without (1) knowing whether netbook users are reporting their
experiences and problems, and turning those into actionable bugs; and
maybe (2) forming an effort to do that in Fedora, with the intention
of getting appropriate fixes upstream.

And just to put *way* too fine a point on it, *that* conversation
needs to be had somewhere other than on this list, too! :-D

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
  http://redhat.com/   -  -  -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug