From: 	seth vidal
Subject: 	friday flames or online desktop confusion?
Date: 	Fri, 19 Oct 2007 04:31:26 +0000 (00:31 EDT)


Okay this isn't really a flame b/c I'm not mad about anything but it's
long and gives the impression of rantiness eventhough it's not a rant.

Yesterday, I had a meeting with some folks and one of them couldn't get
online where he was b/c of some oddball firmware issue b/c of an old
version of a driver. Fine. I reached into my bag, I pulled out a usb key
I carry with me everywhere. It has whatever the latest livecd of fedora
on it. In this case Fedora 8 test3. I hand it to him, tell him to boot
from that and get online. He does, about 2 minutes after he has it he's
online and able to get to the stuff he cares about. He really only needs
his ssh keys, a web browser and a terminal. His needs are pretty small
but not uncommon for people like us. 

So I checked out what my girlfriend does. She runs Fedora 7 on her
laptop. She gets her email through gmail and hotmail (hotmail for the
crap). She uses flickr to host her pictures and she uses liferea and
google reader for rss feeds. Livejournal and logjam for her own blog.
All very simple. She stores very little data locally except for some
personal files - the grand total of those files is 200MB. It's small.
Those personal files change not very often. Average change rate in any
given month is probably 1MB. It's tiny. She could do all of the same
from the usb key if she could just access those files on demand.

Now, this all sounds like an advertisement for the online desktop and I
do get why the online desktop matters, the thing I'm unclear on is why
it seems like we're nipping around the edges of the online desktop in
some ways.

Here's how my argument goes:
1. it's fairly well established that linux makes an excellent
server/appliance. That the tools we and others have developed have made
managing lots of linux servers relatively wonderful and that
performance/price wise linux is a good choice. Yay, we rock.

2. Online services and data storage matter as explained above - their
use case make the local computer significantly less important for
anything other than a network-access-device.

The usbkey of fedora is extremely useful. It's flexible, it runs on a
variety of hw and it gives someone an excellent jumping off point to
access the world. It's also fairly bulletproof in terms of data safety. 

I've used online.gnome.org and I'm a bit frustrated by it b/c it doesn't
let me keep my use interface as I've become accustomed to I'm also
frustrated b/c for the simple case of more or less a roaming profile of
all of my online-service configs + a tiny bit of personal files
mugshot/online.gnome.org are: 
 1. not something I can easily setup for myself on my own xen instance
at a hosting site
 2. not actually providing the capability I need/want.


So I've been trying to figure out what tools/services are needed to make
sense for me. The flow, for me, seems something like:
 boot with usb key
 it logs me in to a generic 'fedora account' on the usb key
 it asks where to go to get my personal information. I type in a
hostname: b52s.sethdot.org
 it asks me for my user name and password for my personal information
site. I give those.
 now it  sets us the fuse (or something like it - thing s3-fuse) access
to my files on b52s.sethdot.org and it preloads into tmp space on the
usbkey my bookmarks and various im, etc config.
 
I'm now up and ready to work. My ssh keys are here  (but not yet
decrypted until I type in that password). I have my web browser with all
my crap, I have a terminal, I have key apps like logjam or gnome-blog. I
have my im configs so pidgin will work. I'm ready to work. For my
personal case if the live image has cvs, git, bzr, hg, geany and joe on
it I'm ready to go. :)
So then I use it, its syncing my data back over to b52s.sethdot.org as I
go and when I'm done, I yank the key, turn off the computer and that's
it. poof.

But what we're doing now is not like that. Or at least it doesn't seem
like that. It seems like the services we're working on here at red hat
are mostly mugshot and social-software oriented. They're not
imap-for-all-my-personal-stuff and they seem to be pushing more
web-based integration of lots of online pieces rather than give me all
the pieces I normally use to work/play online but give them to me in:
  1. the format I expect them in
  2. in an easy-to-setup-server so I can setup my own resource for
storing them and control it myself.

This isn't to say what mugshot does isn't good and potentially powerful,
it's just not the service I think of when I think 'online desktop'.

If it were me (and there's probably a reason it isn't me, :), it seems
like the online service we should be working on would definitely include
good web interfaces for email, im, image sharing, etc b/c it is
important that we have open and free versions of the server-side that
maintains those.  It would also be, essentially, a server side to allow
access to a small amount of data via some well-known protocol
(rsync-fuse or sshfs or s3 or webdav or something along those lines) and
that would be it.

I know what I'm describing. This is 'roaming profiles' but on a
world-wide scale. And yes, that is what _I_ mean when I think of an
'online desktop'.  It's a global, on-demand roaming profile.

It seems like red hat could be providing all of the pieces for this. The
server side, obviously we know how to do, the services themselves - we
need some work on the apps, but the core framework is established
reasonably well with the well known services we use now. And clearly the
usbkey live image provides the 'platform' the user can jump off from.
So are we doing this somewhere and I just can't find it? Am I not
looking hard enough? 

Pointers to better places to look or reasons why what I've said is dumb
are welcome.

Thanks for reading this long.

-sv