Help to make klik better

[probono]

Thanks for your insightful comments. I am always interested in how to make thinks newbie-friendly without upsetting power users.

Perhaps I should make one thing clear first: the idea of klik is to make third party software usable on the Knoppix Live-CD, which is read-only. So everything must run in userland, without root privileges, without write access outside of ~, and single-user. Also, the majority of software comes preinstalled with the Live-CD. klik just adds a few apps that are not on the CD.

My first installation didn't asked where to install - it just installed to my home-dir.

That is what makes sense on Knoppix, but you can move AppDirs anywhere (at least in my latest version of the wrapper). It would be absolutely easy to ask the user where to put the AppDir first. Probably I will include that in the next klik version.

Firefox started and told me 'already running - new profile?' - which ended the possibility to help there.

klik is at the moment a KDE thing. Please set up Konqueror as your default browser. The idea of "profiles" is purely a Firefox thing.

How do I start klik? I thought of 'klik' but no 'klik' in path...

By clicking on a klik link in Konqueror. (Again, I develop purely for KDE, but if you want to, you can write a protocol handler for Firefox, too. No problem)

I installed DBDesigner with klik

The DBDesigner issues you describe are not klik-related.

I found out, that in the lib-dir, a lot of libraries are installed, which are already installed in /usr/lib etc.
That's annoying. You waste internet band-width, harddrive-space, and a lot of time.

Well... You can copy the DBDesigner folder over to another machine... and it will run! But I agree, there should be some universally agreed standard on which libraries are the "core system" (and expected on any machine) and which ones are "special" (and must come with the app that needs them). Another possible solution is serverside-apt, which I am developing. It will check which libraries are installed on your machine and download only the missing ones.

An updated library has to be put to every user, and every app.

No, only apps that need the updated library will have to come with it. Just like the Mac. I don't want that my running core system gets touched (in fact, with Live-CD it can't) just because one app needs a newer version of a lib. The core system should never be touched just to make an app run.

Why don't you ship new computers for every app?

That would ensure everything runs flawless! (Indeed, I would love to have a virtual machine for each app so that an app behaves deterministic and can't mess with the rest if the system. But that's really overkill then...)

Another issue: Your script (dbdstart) contains a lot of backtics.

That's DBDesigner's script, not mine. But thanks for the info, I also used backticks.

The directories are called 'Data, Doc, Linuxlib, ...' That's MS-style, where nobody uses CLI.

again, DBDesigner's. Install quanta, for example, and you will see /usr,... etc.