[247] in athena10
Re: Popular locker software
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan Reed)
Thu Jun 19 10:20:10 2008
Cc: Greg Hudson <ghudson@mit.edu>
Message-Id: <081562C2-8DA1-46EE-9B21-C8EB6A1D3E0C@mit.edu>
From: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@MIT.EDU>
To: athena10@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <A043EF4C-2DC4-4E36-9AA2-AE1C2F2B9E96@mit.edu>
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Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:19:25 -0400
It was pointed out to me that Alex is not on this list, though I
believe he was reading it via discuss. However, I will follow up with
Alex about the questions I had for him.
-Jon
On Jun 19, 2008, at 10:13 AM, Jonathan Reed wrote:
> 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.
>
