ThanksStewart Campbell wrote:To whom it may concern, Firstly, please accept my congratulations and thanks to the Fedora team and the Fedora community. My name is Stewart Campbell and I am the director of Nebtrex Distribution (a Brisbane based firm in Australia). My company switched to Fedora several years ago for our internal systems and servers, and it has provided us with an excellent platform.Good to know. Congrats on your product release. My name is Stewart Campbell and I am the directory of Nebtrex Distribution. We are a distributor based in Brisbane Australia. We provide a number of services to the Australian IT reseller channel. Services such as OEM system packages, full system builds/packages and Backup Server Appliances. We also distribute a range of spare parts and products to the reseller channel.The purpose of this email is to inform the Fedora community (especially the marketing sectors) that we have just launched a new product in Australia running Fedora 8. This new desktop product comes pre-installed with Fedora 8 (also supplied on DVD). We have made many modifications to the image to provide, what we believe, is a easy to use platform for both business and home markets. I hope this information will be of some use to the Fedora marketing and also act as another example of what can be achieved with Fedora. If you would like more information regarding this product release, please do not hesitate to contact me directly.There are some obvious questions from the Fedora perspective: Tell us about yourself The product is aimed at the following markets:Can you give us more details about your product? - Business user who will use it to mostly connect into a terminal server and work from there - Business user who is ready to switch to open source - Home user for general use, 2nd machine scenarios, basically most home use applications except gaming We have tried to make sure that most common tasks a user would want to do in the environments listed above are easy and available through the GUI. It is also aimed at existing Microsoft Windows users as we believe most users will find the change over easy with this system. To make things easier for our resellers support staff and for the end users we have customised the Fedora 8 DVD. We still have the original Fedora options but we have a factory install which sets up the system with all the changes we have made from the factory minus the updates. We have also added hardware diagnostics for the system hardware to help support staff identify and or eliminate hardware as they cause of the problem they are having. I have been a Fedora user for some years now. Several years ago my company company switched over from a Microsoft environment to a mixed environment (Windows and Fedora) and then to a almost Fedora only environment. I say almost as we have a single Windows Terminal server here to run a small number of Windows only based applications. I have been very happy with the switch to Fedora and see it as a continual growing success with each release. We specifically chose Fedora for this product for these main reasons:Why Fedora? - Based on company experience the product was easy to customise and provided a good platform. - Wanted to provide a Linux based desktop for some time now and felt that this was achievable with Fedora 8. My personal opinion was that Fedora 8 was a very big improvement in so many areas over previous Fedora releases. - Wanted an alternative to supply a desktop product that was not pre-loaded with Vista. We currently do not provide any products with Vista, a majority of our desktops are all pre-loaded with Windows XP. Even though the OEM dates have been extended by Microsoft, we will in the near future no longer be able to source XP. The company has been operating for almost six years now.When did you get started? Tools used:What kind of changes have you made? How did you make them? (Did you use tools like livecd-creator or pungi?) - Mostly gedit to manually edit the config files - gconf-edit to change defaults There were quite a few changes we made. Here is a brief list: - Created a custom kickstart for our custom install over network boot servers so that we can image many systems at once - Created our own Fedora 8 internal repo so that the second stage of the install process installs all updates from our local repo so the user does not have a massive download when they receive the desktop - Added extra archive support so the users who are used to a GUI environment like Windows can just click on most archive file formats and it will open in archive manager - Customised keyboard settings so that the Internet keys on the keyboard will work out of the box. Key like mute/un-mute, volume up, volume down, Windows Start Menu key will select the main Applications menu, CD playback keys etc. - DVD, VCD, CD auto play in full screen when inserted. - We have made sure most file formats are supported and load in the correct applications. Formats like MP4, MP3, WAV, DOC, PPT, XLS, PDF, image formats etc. - Browser (Firefox) is pre-installed with Adobe flash and Java plugins so the user can start using the Internet straight away without having to worry about installing and configuring these plugins. - Remote Desktop, we have installed an easy to use GUI for remote desktop use. Out of the box it supports RDP, RDPv5, VNC, XDMCP. - GUI PPTP VPN client is also installed to make it easy for business users to connect into another network. - Bluetooth support installed and set-up. If a user has a Bluetooth USB adapter and plugs it is, system automatically detect and provide Bluetooth support. - Customised default user profile so that many minor settings have been altered so each user account created automatically has what we believe an easy to user interface and less changes are required for the user to just user the system without have to customise first. - Added the livna repo for installing some of the extra packages we wanted. - Changed the default applications to a range of applications that suit both the home and business market. A lot of the default applications were kept as they were ones we wanted anyway. - We also install and customise an open source web based admin product so that most common admin tasks can be performed from support personal with just a web browser even will the user is still using the system. As there were no changes to the original RPM's or code nothing has been submitted back to Fedora. But I/we (the company) do support Open Source and especially open standards. If the changes/processes we used to customise and deliver the product are of benefit to Fedora and the community then we would be happy to contribute where we can. I would appreciate advise on how we could do this and in what areas we can contribute besides coding.Have you contributed any of these changes back to Fedora? Future roadmap is to release more desktop products with Fedora and some entry level server products with Fedora.What is the future roadmap? One bit of feedback I can provide straight away that is very important to us is longer support and update cycles for Fedora releases. I understand that Fedora has a reasonably quick release cycle and I don't know if this is totally out of the question. For example, recently Fedora 6 support ended. It would have been great to see Fedora 6 updates still being supported for at least another 12 months.What can we do to make Fedora a better base for your product? I hope this provides enough information to answer your questions. I also forgot to mention that we don't charge for Fedora. The system is the same price as what we would have sold the system hardware for without an operating system. This gives the consumer more choice and a provides them with a desktop solution that is more cost effective. Regards Stewart In addition, I would like to suggest the introduction of a Fedora site devoted to products utilising the OS. This would encourage promotion to new and existing Fedora users. As Fedora is used internationally, appropriate filtering would be useful.We are close to launching a news site. We could probably have a section there. I am not sure a separate site is useful unless we have a number of other prominent projects/products based on Fedora to promote. Rahul |
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