Journal stephenbooth's Journal: Making desktop Linux 'Just Work'
I just got back from this month's meeting of the South Birmingham Linux User Group. There was supposed to be a talk by Eric Raymond, President and co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, but he was called away at short notice for a conference call with Sun Microsystems (it was strongly suspected that it was to do with rumours of Sun making their Java Virtual Machine open source). Instead we had a talk from John Pinner of Clockwork Software Systems on the subject of open source in Enterprise and SME businesses. After the talk there was a panel Q&A session on the subject.
One of the things that came up, in connection with Linux on the desktop, was the problem that users are used to things 'just working' (i.e. they plug a camera, printer or whatever in the USB port and it mdetects the device and installs the required drivers with no major user intervention, just putting in a CD). This is not what users currently get with Linux. One of the panel mentioned 'Project Utopia'. Apparently this project is basically to give Linux exactly that functionality, that users now expect. He then went on to say that the people involved haven't really gotten into publicising the project, just writing about it in their blogs. There is a home page for the project (or possibly another project of the same name) but it contains 4 words ("Project Utopia" at the top in large bold print and immediately below that "*under construction*"). A Google search on 'Project Utopia' does turn up some links (NB I'm using Google's Personalized Search, you should still see the same links but maybe in a different order), most of the first page seem to be articles on Linux oriented sites or forum/blog entries.
It seems that one of the developers will be speaking at OSCON on the subject of "Project Utopia: Making Hardware Just Work".
Making desktop Linux 'Just Work' More Login
Making desktop Linux 'Just Work'
Slashdot Top Deals