[291] in athena10
Re: Popular locker software
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alex T Prengel)
Tue Jul 1 17:32:26 2008
Message-Id: <200807012131.m61LVdUi022877@dit.mit.edu>
To: jdreed@MIT.EDU
cc: alexp@MIT.EDU, athena10@MIT.EDU, ghudson@MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:31:39 -0400
From: Alex T Prengel <alexp@MIT.EDU>
Sorry for the belated reply- Bill figured out I wasn't on athena10 and
forwarded it:
ghudson 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.
jdreed wrote:
> 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?
MATLAB
Mathematica
Stata
SAS
Xess
Maple
Tecplot
Pro-E
S-Plus
I'd skip Pro-E and S-Plus (both very little used now) but keep Tecplot.
>There's also the question of what to do
> with StarOffice. Alex: Do you have any info about who still uses
> StarOffice over OpenOffice?
Usage between the 2 of these has been running 95-98% OpenOffice
lately. I have no idea who StarOffice users are. I'm happy to keep
installing it in a locker for users who prefer it, but see no
particular need to keep it in panel menus.
If we go with Jon's suggestion that we mostly limit listed apps to
ones in the WRW ""Major Applications" list, and which I'm sort of OK
with, we'll have a lot fewer menu-listed applications. Users may not
be happy with that, but I have no way of knowing how much they care.
Some additional apps that are widely used, and probably good
candidates for inclusion in the new submenu: Acrobat Reader, DrScheme,
Meep, gnuplot, Eclipse, Gaussian, Applixware.
There's lots of others, but usage tails off more or less quickly and
there are many things for which I have no statistics.
I would definitely include the "Software Information" "list of
available software" and "what's new" entries so users can at least
easily get to the full list of what's out there (these could also
be preset custom browser bookmarks).
One thing users may miss more is the whole courseware group; I just
don't know how much it matters though- you may want to run this by Jim
Cain (jrcain) and Molly Ruggles (ruggles) in DUE.
>I think letting the summer printing runs be for 9.4 and handling
>Athena 10 documentation separately (this year) makes the most sense.
Fine by me.
About "Native PDF reader"- does this mean acroread, or some other Open Source
pdf viewer? I have a feeling most users will prefer to use acroread.
Alex
