But what's really missing is some of that ever-popular BLINKing text, some large red letters on a colourful background, loads of clip art animations, and some huge pictures to make the visitors wait over a minute for the first page. That ought to do it.
Chris Mason Box 340, The Valley, Anguilla, British West Indies Tel: 264 497 5670 Fax: 264 497 8463 USA Fax (561) 382-7771 Take a virtual tour of the island http://net.ai/ The Anguilla Guide Find out more about NetConcepts www.netconcepts.ai bwz*mq -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Tom Pfeifer Sent: Friday, May 19, 2000 6:37 AM To: debian-user@lists.debian.org; debian-devel@lists.debian.org Subject: Re: Why is the Debian home page so boring? I'm not saying that the home page couldn't be improved, but remember that Debian is not a commercial distribution, so there is no reason to give the appearance of trying to sell you something. When I was a Linux newcomer a couple of years ago, it was actually the simplicity and lack of clutter on the home page that appealed to me and helped me get going with Debian. I wanted to know basically what Debian was and how do I go about getting it and installing it. The answers I needed were right there in very simple terms. If any of Debian's advanced features had been described there, I wouldn't have understood or appreciated them anyway at that point. Tom Svante Signell wrote: > > Hello, > > I've been running Debian on one of my home network computer for a > while now. Starting from slink, upgrading to potato and following > further upgrades to unstable/woody. The combination of apt-get update > and apt-get dist-upgrade is really excellent!! Combined with the > power of dpkg maintaining and upgrading Linux is EASY, especially > compared to other distributions. It took some time to get used to > though, but the excellent mailing lists have been very helpful. By > following mailing lists you realize a lot of things are happening > behind the scene. > > On other computers I have RedHat, Mandrake and SuSE distributions. My > first installation of Linux was RedHat 5.0 a few years ago. Since then > I have been installing and upgrading rpm-based distributions. The > installation of Debian was something I thought about to do for a long > time, but wanted to wait for the Potato release -:( Since the release > of Potato "never" happened, I finally decided to make a try with > Slink! I don't regret taking that decision, debian is one of the best > distributions. > > Now to the point: > > Looking at the Debian home page, one get the impression that only the > now very old Slink distribution, with kernel 2.0.36, old X, old libc, > etc, released March 1999 is available. The News section mentions the > testing of a new distribution is ongoing. NOTHING is said about the > power of apt-get and the ease of upgrading using the web to more > recent software. Also, nothing is mentioned about the availability of > kernel-2.2.15, XFrre86-3.3.6, glibc-2.1.3, etc, already today, even > BEFORE Potato has been released. > > Following is a proposal on what to emphasize on the FIRST page: > > 1. Rewrite the Getting Started section, e.g. inform about the large > number of architectures and packages supported. This surely > attracts new users. > 2. Something on apt-get, and upgrading from the web. > 3. Rewrite the News section, e.g. add links to recent packages > available, with highlights, updated frequently. > 4. In addition to the Weekly News link, add more frequent updates to > the News section. Surely, by following the excellent mailing lists, > you realize much more is happening than what is reported on the > first page. > > PS: > On the wish list for the distribution I would like to add an smp > kernel. Other distributions have. Today this has to be made manually, > even if excellent tools are available for this. > > Best regards, > Svante Signell > -- Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] < /dev/null
