[246] in athena10
Re: Popular locker software
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan Reed)
Thu Jun 19 10:14:34 2008
Cc: athena10@mit.edu
Message-Id: <A043EF4C-2DC4-4E36-9AA2-AE1C2F2B9E96@mit.edu>
From: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@MIT.EDU>
To: ghudson@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <200806191342.m5JDg0qn029432@outgoing.mit.edu>
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Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:13:50 -0400
Remind me what's happening with psuedo-locker software such as
OpenOffice and Acrobat Reader? Are we using the native Ubuntu
versions? If so, what is the future of the lockers?
And will we still be adding applications to the panel itself? My
documentation and frosh presentations rely on the presence of the
"Mail", "WWW" and "Prompt" icons, but I can change that if necessary
(as long as I know by August what the new layout will be). If we're
still adding applications to the panel, I'd like to see Emacs punted
or replaced with gedit, and having OpenOffice and Acrobat in the panel
would be nice.
Has any outreach been made to pubs? I know the pocket references go
to the printer soon, and they do include screenshots. It would
probably be good to know what deadlines there are, so we can at least
have a mockup for screenshots. Or will Athena 10 documentation be
handled separately from the summer printing runs? At the very least,
I'd imagine we won't need as much Athena 9.4 documentation.
Getting back to the question at hand, in addtition to MATLAB, I'd
include the other apps from the "Major Applications" table on the
"What Runs Where" page, dropping those which will no longer exist. So
basically:
Maple
Mathematica
MATLAB
Pro-E
SAS
S-Plus
Stata
Tecplot
Xess
I think S-Plus and Tecplot have seen declining usage, so we could punt
those. Alex: Can you provide a rough ranking of those apps in order
of popularity? There's also the question of what to do with
StarOffice. Alex: Do you have any info about who still uses
StarOffice over OpenOffice? Perhaps any demand for StarOffice could
be satisfied with OpenOffice add-ons such as template packs and sample
docs. But that's a a bit outside the scope of the question.
If we feel like it, having a few of the more popular online resources
in the menu might be nice, via the libraries.mit.edu/get/ URL scheme:
libraries.mit.edu/get/safari
libraries.mit.edu/get/oed
etc
But perhaps those are best maintained as global Firefox bookmarks or
something, and there is the fact that the user might not have certs.
-Jon
On Jun 19, 2008, at 9:42 AM, ghudson@MIT.EDU wrote:
> In Athena 9.4, we hijacked the GNOME panel menu entirely and, through
> a complicated mechanism, outsourced its maintenance to some nebulous
> group of people over in Academic Computing (a sub-department which no
> longer exists). That menu structure hasn't changed since late 2005.
>
> In Athena 10 we will not be hijacking the panel menu, but we will be
> providing, via standard mechanisms, a sub-menu named "Locker Software"
> providing easy access to popular software. To qualify, a piece of
> software should be:
>
> * Commercial, or otherwise not available natively in Ubuntu
> * Used with reasonably high frequency
> * Possessing of educational value
>
> The poster child is Matlab. I could probably name a few other pieces
> of locker software I believe to be popular off the top of my head, but
> there are others here more qualified to do so. So, if you have
> insight in this area, please respond with your list.
>
> Thanks.
