Fedora core suggestions

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 4/21/06, Paul W. Frields <stickster at gmail.com> wrote:
> One alternative for non-technical users which Jef Spaleta mentioned a
> little while ago in IRC was testing of high-level functionality and
> interfaces using VMWare Player and an image provided by Fedora.  This
> would potentially lower barriers not only to non-technical users but to
> willing folks who only have a single system available, or have a low
> risk threshold for some other reason.
>
> VMWare has opened its VMDK (virtual disk) format for use by anyone[1] so
> there's nothing preventing an intrepid Fedora hacker from designing a
> converter program.  The community could then make some decisions about
> one or more "test platform" images that could be converted to VMDK and
> distributed via the existing BitTorrent tracker.  People using either
> Windows or Linux could then download the free VMWare Player to run the
> Fedora VMDK image.


Someone has to check on the licensing is for the VMDK crap. My IRC
musing was a whatif.. based on the assumption that the VMDK crap made
it possible to engineer a player image with a yet-to-be-created open
tool.  Its possible right now to have player images, we saw the
community create them in the fc5 testing phase. But i strongly feel
the Fedora project shouldn't be offering official vmware player images
until its possible to create those images with an open tool. I'm
desperately hopeful that the VMDK licensing change is enough to make
such an open tool possible.

But as other pointed out in the same irc discussion special purposed
images that I was thinking of have a very high bandwidth consumption.
There might be another way to do a similar thing with a centralize vnc
or FreeNX terminal server, which we give out "tester" accounts to and
pre-configure some logins and log how people do specific tasks on that
terminal server.  Basically a central terminal server Fedora sets up
designed to delibrately watch how people interact with the system.


-jef