Experimental LiveCD
August 18, 2007
So the desktop team here at Red Hat has decided we want a little more freedom in trying new ideas for Fedora. We can’t put radical changes into the main Fedora spin, because those types of changes often require make choices for the user that may alienate someone who currently uses Fedora.
Since Fedora 7, users of Fedora have had the ability to do custom spins pretty easily. Using that same infrastructure we (the desktop team) are going to do our own spin that tries various things, like disabling the root account, and not asking the user what partitioning scheme they want. Presumably, some of these ideas won’t work out, but it’s nice to have a play area where we can experiment and find the things the really work.
The key here is that we’re try to narrow the scope of the spin. It will specifically be ill-suited for a lot of users who happily use Fedora. Those users can keep using the mainline spin, though.
Aside from that we started a Desktop “Special Interest Group” (SIG) so that people outside of Red Hat can get more involved. We now hold weekly meetings on IRC.
Anyway, discussion about what should happen on the LiveCD happens on fedora-desktop-list
August 20, 2007 at 12:08 am
[…] The Fedora team are building an “experimental” desktop spin. This is a really, really cool idea. A chance to do cool stuff that people might not like but could be a radical improvement. I’ve talked on LugRadio in the past about how incremental improvement is safe and easy but won’t win the war, and this sort of experimentation is exactly what I think we need. Great idea, fedora team. I’d like to be involved but I’m worried I don’t have time. […]