A nice start

[kurt]

Well, I'm posting from KNOS via FF on a Dell GX280 running on 2 GB RAM. While I have used Gnome off and on for years, this is not quite like slipping on an old pair of shoes. And yes, the speed of reading from the DVD is slower than reading from HDD, this is way cool. I do like the selected apps. I suppose that a newsreader is something for the future. Could use T-bird I suppose, but I have never liked T-bird for news. Mail, yes, news nope.

Will explore this more over the next weeks. Thus far on the initial boot, smooth sailing.

Cheers,

Kurt

[Kevin McAleavey]

Jun 12, 2010 12:50:27 GMT -5 kurt said:

Well, I'm posting from KNOS via FF on a Dell GX280 running on 2 GB RAM. While I have used Gnome off and on for years, this is not quite like slipping on an old pair of shoes. And yes, the speed of reading from the DVD is slower than reading from HDD, this is way cool. I do like the selected apps. I suppose that a newsreader is something for the future. Could use T-bird I suppose, but I have never liked T-bird for news. Mail, yes, news nope.

Will explore this more over the next weeks. Thus far on the initial boot, smooth sailing.

Cheers,

Kurt

Thanks for the kind words! Since the intent for KNOS is to be something ever so familiar for IT departments and the like to hand out to their Windows users to take out on the road, we wanted to make it look as "corporate familiar" as possible, and for our complement of apps to also be as familiar as what they're used to using. So Nancy smacked me every time I tried to get "creative" with the apps, keeping the "prime directive" for the end user as it is. We wanted KNOS to work like an Apple and look like Windows. You might note that in the default theme. Speaking of themes, right click on the desktop and check out some of the styles we shipped along as themes. Might amuse you andeveryone else.

As for usenet, takes a strong person to admit they're still living in the 90's. Heh. Go up top, click on "Applications" then "Office" and you'll see something called "Evolution mail and calendar." Give it a go ... it should be VERY familiar to Outlook users. NNTP can be done in there though it's as much of a pain to set up newsgroups as it is on Outlook. We got your back!

[kurt]

I finally noticed Evolution after I had posted my initial report I did play around with themes and screen savers. Then it was time to watch the USA-England World Cup match.

Regarding the DTE, I tend to be a minimalist, having forsaken Gnome for xfce for all of my Unix derived boxen. Some will whine that Gnome is not as Windows like as KDE, but I have always felt that KDE was too "busy" for my own tastes.

If KNOS is going to be pitched to the IT gang as a secure road warrior OS, there will be a need for a degree of persistence of settings such as the theme, screen saver, address book. But I suspect that you are all too aware of this already.

I did have one small gripe regarding finding printers. I use a Samsung laser ML- 2150 that is local for the Dell GX280. Was unable to find the printer. Will have another shot at that later this day. I'm also going to play with KNOS on an IBM T42 that sports 1 gm RAM and is my wifi machine. I use WAP2 with a 63bit key for home WLAN. More to report later.

Cheers!

[unclemark]

Jun 13, 2010 8:06:46 GMT -5 kurt said:

If KNOS is going to be pitched to the IT gang as a secure road warrior OS, there will be a need for a degree of persistence of settings such as the theme, screen saver, address book. But I suspect that you are all too aware of this already.

Not to mention connectivity and basic graphics like screen resolution.

Some time back there was an implementation of Mepis called On The Go, which was a Live CD, plus the ability to store settings to USB. Puppy had a similar capability.

In any case, it's imperative that this have the best auto-detection and auto-configuration possible. If the user has to mess with this to any extent every time he boots, I'm afraid you'll never get out of the gate. At least on an installed implementation, you only have to set it up once. If I had to configure my connection and screen every time I booted, I doubt that I'd be willing to put up with that on a regular basis.

In my short test drive, I did run into one xorg-related "bug" on my setup -- in Firefox, using the mouse scroll wheel activated the Back and Forward page switching, rather than scrolling the page up and down. I'm using a MS IntelliMouse branded five button (four buttons + wheel) PS/2 with this xorg.conf entry in Linux:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "PS/2 Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "auto"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "false"
Option "Emulate3Timeout" "70"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Buttons" "5"
EndSection

HTH

[Kevin McAleavey]

Jun 13, 2010 8:06:46 GMT -5 kurt said:

Regarding the DTE, I tend to be a minimalist, having forsaken Gnome for xfce for all of my Unix derived boxen. Some will whine that Gnome is not as Windows like as KDE, but I have always felt that KDE was too "busy" for my own tastes.

If KNOS is going to be pitched to the IT gang as a secure road warrior OS, there will be a need for a degree of persistence of settings such as the theme, screen saver, address book. But I suspect that you are all too aware of this already.

I did have one small gripe regarding finding printers. I use a Samsung laser ML- 2150 that is local for the Dell GX280. Was unable to find the printer. Will have another shot at that later this day. I'm also going to play with KNOS on an IBM T42 that sports 1 gm RAM and is my wifi machine. I use WAP2 with a 63bit key for home WLAN. More to report later.

Cheers!

Greetings once again! We looked at XFCE and a few others, but for now we felt going that way for our first "show and tell" would look a little too "Linuxy" for the Windows users we're targeting. And KDE just didn't look sufficiently polished and requires a bit too much attention. For customized builds of course, we'll build anything the distributor wants to do. Gnome just seemed the best fit for now.

As to the IT crowd, the purpose of this test release is to find out what hardware we don't have covered more than anything else. We tested our builds for the past year with all we could find locally and all was well with that. Since we built this version with "the kitchen sink" anyone who has problems with their hardware is someone we need to pay close attention to. When we're actually ready to go forward, the intent of KNOS is to work with the IT people's servers (or cloud or our own portal) where the configuration settings will be stored and brought down on top of the defaults each time the end user connects. We also have a way to do that now, but haven't included the scripting code in hopes of being able to set up that portal as soon as we can afford to and incorporate all that into the next build once we see how this one goes. But rest assured that there indeed *is* a design well beyond what we're presenting at this time.

Samsungs ... yep. Me too. I have a CLP-300 which is supported. Samsung isn't terribly helpful as far as their technicals go and the people who are working on supporting Samsung for BSD are trying to add more. Samsung has a proprietary format which depends on Windows to do the heavy lifting and so far, only those models that they've provided information from have made it into the drivers for Apple's CUPS thingy. We expected to see many missing here, sorry yours is one of them at this time. Your ML-2150 is supported in the SPLIX drivers, but not in the foomatic ones. We had to pull SPLIX from this build owing to some probems with CUPS. It'll be back in the next build hopefully once CUPS is fixed.

[Kevin McAleavey]

Jun 13, 2010 11:51:16 GMT -5 unclemark said:

In my short test drive, I did run into one xorg-related "bug" on my setup -- in Firefox, using the mouse scroll wheel activated the Back and Forward page switching, rather than scrolling the page up and down. I'm using a MS IntelliMouse branded five button (four buttons + wheel) PS/2 with this xorg.conf entry in Linux:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "PS/2 Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "auto"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "false"
Option "Emulate3Timeout" "70"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Buttons" "5"
EndSection

HTH

Sorry for the wait, wanted to check this out. I trust I hopefully answered your other question and comment in the previous post. We do things a bit differently in BSD, but with the same result normally. The TWO button one behaves just fine, so there's something different about the four-button one that isn't like the other one. Heh.

I'm going to pass this one back to the Xorg team in BSD since detection of devices is done by some hocus-pocus in their part, and we use a superimposed script of our own to do the autodetection which tells me that a specification for that specific mouse doesn't exist and needs to. They're the best ones to handle this so that other BSD's also can detect it properly, so I've filed a PR on the issue. Sorry for the weirdness there, our rodents with Billywheels work just fine, not that it helps your situation any.

Hopefully a proper ident on your hardware will be added to the hocus-pocus so that nobody has to edit anything. That's our desired outcome for all of KNOS. Plug it in, turn it on, use it and no worries of any kind. Thanks for letting me know!

[jerry]

I've used Live Linux CD in the past. The coolest thing with KNOS is the ability to store data via USB, print, and utilize multimedia. I'm looking forward to the continued development. Thanks Kevin and Nancy!