Ubuntu Business Remix update

[Alan Bell]

On 31/01/12 09:27, Jonathan Carter (highvoltage) wrote:
> Hi!
>
> If I may chime in? ...
me too!

I have wanted a business desktop remix for some time. The partner 
archive does not seem to be particularly relevant to this, I have some 
reservations about the partner archive, mostly already stated, but here 
is my list:
* Alfresco came and went and was broken and I couldn't contribute a fix 
and reporting bugs was painful as it fell in the gap between Canonical 
and Alfresco.
* Anyone installing it would be worse off than installing manually from 
upstream because there were no updates to the packaged version, no clear 
plan on whether it would be best to wait for a new packaged upgrade or 
dump upstream source on top of the packaged installed Alfresco (at best, 
if it worked at all this would be unsupported by anyone)
* Sun Java was in the partner repo and wasn't a wise installation choice
* Stuff gets added post-release with no pre-release testing, nowhere to 
report bugs and contribute fixes on Launchpad etc. etc.)

so right now for me the partner repo is empty.
http://archive.canonical.com/dists/precise/partner/binary-amd64/

Looking back at Oneiric it contains Adobe reader (evince is better), 
Adobe flash (standard downloader package works fine) and something 
called centrifydc which relates to authenticating against a windows 
server of some kind. Thats it.

Incidentally, it might be fine, but a filename of <fdopen> looks a bit 
odd to me in 
http://archive.canonical.com/dists/oneiric/partner/binary-amd64/Packages.gz

For me at least, Ubuntu + an elderly version of Adobe reader is not 
really my vision of what the Ubuntu business desktop remix could be.

What I would like to see is a vision for the Ubuntu desktop in a 
business context that is Free Software end to end.

* Gwibber for connecting to public and private social business networks 
like Linked-in, Ecademy, Yammer, Huddle or an internal Elgg etc
* Empathy instant messaging with support for Sametime, Groupwise
* De-emphasise the music and photo stuff. Banshee/Rhythmbox are fine to 
have, people listen to music at work, but clicking the dash right now 
(yeah I know it is changing) would kind of imply that "look at photos" 
and "listen to music" is 50% of what the computer is *for*
* Lenses for connecting to open and proprietary business systems. I 
really want to know the right way to do an authenticated lens. I would 
like to search in the dash for a customer name and find correspondence 
in Alfresco, contact information from vTiger (or even SalesForce.com), 
invoices and project details from OpenERP or SAP, and a button to click 
to call the contacts through an Asterisk server.
* A relationship with Ubuntu Server. I want to install the Ubuntu 
Business Desktop and it should ask "Where is my Ubuntu Server please" 
and then everything just works, in terms of authentication, printing, 
configuration. Right now there is no special magic between Ubuntu 
desktop and Ubuntu server.

none of this is particularly relevant to the partner repo.

Alan.