Barriers to Entry, how do we knock them down?

I found installing OPIE for the first time was a huge challenge. How do
we make this a non-issue for the new guys?

These are my oppinions, please take these ideas with a grain of salt and
a lot of imagination. I'm willing to help out with programming these
variouse things, but I'm very inexperienced with the Qt environment and
especially with cross-compiling development. I am slowly working my way
into it, with hopefully a big boost this week when I dive right into Qt
for a research project in my full time. :)

In my oppinion, we could really use an installation as close to one
click as possible, with zero click maintenance, so non-techie users can
setup and use it.

The most important barriers to entry are:
1) Too many warning, leaving newby users guessing.
2) dependency on serial to setup the flash.
3) command line know-how.
4) usb networking setup.

I'll go into more detail about each:
1) Too many warning, leaving newby users guessing.
   There are TONNS of warnings on all the installation tutorials, about
how installing the boot loader can brick your device. While this is
good for covering our asses, it deters many people from even trying.
Installation should be simple, rock solid, and in worst cases have
recoverable fallbacks.
   If possible, something as simple as the compaq care installer would
be nice, where all the flash rom installation can get setup in one
click. Perferably a simple WinCE executable installation. We could build
on BitBlaster, and streamline it to install the bootloader and a JFFS2
image in one shot.

2) dependency on serial to setup the flash.
  Most people don't have the 31137 hacker skilz to modify their usb
cradle into a serial device, or want to bother purchasing a serial cable
for an experiment. The bootloader desperately needs USB support. Here's
an idea, I believe it's possible to make the boot loader create a VFAT
Ram Disk, and turn the ipaq into a USB storage device! The boot loader
could then wait until a complete JFFS2 image and an MD5 file are
uploaded to the device, then begin verifying the image is complete and
correct, and finally start flashing a new ROOT image. This could
universally be supported on MAC, Windows, and Linux where USB storage
with VFAT are supported.

3) command line know-how.
  IMHO, I believe requiring command line setup/configuration is too much
to ask of new users who have never seen such a thing before. There are
certainly quite a few people that don't mind learning command line
usage, however this provides one of the most significant barriers to
entry for new users. Lets keep the main line installation and operation
away from commandline, but still accessible for the more advanced users.

4) usb networking setup.
   For my first attempt at setting up the usb networking, I was pretty
stumped. Just about everyone has USB these days, and it offers
extremely convenient plug&play setup and usability for things that
support it. For the new-user linux community perhaps we should provide
a nice convenient DEB and RPM for usbnet setup and auto pointopoint
configuration. Hotplug is extremely useful with OPIE, and now Mandrake
supports HotPlug, is there some way to put 2 and 2 together?
For other environments, I think there are already efforts to make USB
networking plug&play ready.

Perhaps if we sort out this "enabling" stuff, so that total newbies can
do this, then I can imagine a lot of industry support for opie
development. Especially when entire enterprise level businesses move
over to OPIE because it is quick, cheap, and open source therefore more
secure from latent lock-in issues.

Anyone else have ideas to make OPIE more accessible to the new guys?
- Aaron.
Received on Fri May 17 2002 - 00:55:17 EDT