Where goes DoudouLinux?

DoudouLinux reached a satisfying development status by mid 2011, enough to be available for the general public as an official stable release freely downloadable. However, many improvements can still be added, since additional ideas have grown around the initial idea, so the project is still growing. All these ideas do not necessarily match technical topics as you will see, even if this is the main goal. Therefore, if you like the project and wish to contribute to it, we try to maintain in this page a short list of ideas to develop so that you can have an idea of topics that may match your skills. A more exhaustive list of task can be viewed on our project management portal, using the Gantt chart.

Road map

The DoudouLinux team has voted for a 3 month period of cyclic development. From version 2010-11, development versions are planned to come generally every 3 months. They will be named according to the year-month of release, for example, 2011-02, 2011-05, 2011-08, etc. Although the official stable release Gondwana is not expected to follow this release cycle, we will also bring Gondwana updates regularly, at least to provide improved translations.

Some planned technical evolutions for upcoming releases are listed below. This does not mean that non-technical aspects will not change, on the contrary, we also wish to improve the graphical design going forward. Finally, please note that technical evolutions planned for each version may be added or removed depending on work achieved and, we hope, with the arrival of new project contributors.

• a tool to limit computer use during certain times of day (hours, duration)
• a tool to display persistence activation in the panel (with a notification icon)
• a tool to set the time of day
• a tool to change the keyboard layout of a previously downloaded ISO image
• allow installing/updating DoudouLinux without wiping your entire disk
• replace the activity menu with a more flexible tool, better fitting the need
• improve user interface for the DoudouLinux installation tool
• improve user interface for the hardware issue report tool
• improve user interface for the persistence activation tool

More details for some of these tasks can be found on the page we had prepared for the Google Summer of Code 2012 (and that finally rejected our project).

How to improve DoudouLinux

Of course we are always interested in finding new contributors to translate both CD and website, so you can have a look at the section Translation status and help us achieve this huge task. Nevertheless our project can benefit from very different professionals: graphics designers, musicians, writers, specialist in communication, interface development, code development, system tool development, web services development, etc. Of course the main issue of cultural content is its copyright. We may need to redo artwork by ourselves to solve this issue.

As of this writing, hot topics that we wish to develop are the following:

• graphics design
  • creation of a graphical theme for CD
  • derive theme for website
  • communication supports (leaflet, poster)

• music
  • provide children songs using Songwrite
  • provide traditional musics or songs
  • create modern music pieces (for children) → samba, jazz, blues, funk, etc.

• writing
  • provide traditional poems and fables
  • provide novels and short stories
  • rewrite classical stories such as mythologies

• communication
  • write articles for online magazines or community websites
  • make videos
  • make tutorials
  • help users in one of the CD’s languages
  • poster campaigns, organizing demonstration shows

• development
  • a DoudouLinux server flavor for computer rooms
  • install DoudouLinux inside a Windows® system without repartitioning, à la Ubuntu
  • have a DoudouLinux version for ARM™ processors, or any other one
  • a multi-lingual DVD

• web development, in order to generate a customized DoudouLinux version
  • let users change keyboard layout online
  • let users change time zone online
  • let users change the activity menu online

Please note that this list is not exhaustive, so if you think that we have overlooked something, do not hesitate to share with us!

Other orientations

One of the team concerns is to ensure the project durability. For this reason we have started to give the project a legal structure in order to be able to welcome funding (donation, sponsorship and other allocations) and to sell CD’s or USB keys: this is the DoudouLinux association [1]. This would help us rent a powerful computing infrastructure (servers) and finance promotion events such as participating in expositions and salons. If the budget is sufficient, we can even imagine to let people test DoudouLinux online on rented servers through remote control systems like VNC or a remote X server.