Hey,

One issue that probably requires some thought is the general branding experience
of Indiana from a user point of view - that is, the user experience from when
that first LiveCD enters the CD-ROM tray and comes up on the system, to them
installing it on the disk.

While everyone probably has a good idea of what would likely happen, we need to
start getting specific right down to the specifics, from the content in the
installer [1], to the desktop background and the default homepage of Firefox
[2]. There are lots of opportunities to get our brand across, and provide useful
information for the new user - but what, where and when?

What?
=====
>From my perspective, I'd really like to promote the OpenSolaris community 
>brand,
and create a sense of pride and ownership for what we have created. I think
whatever we do needs to be simple, not overly cluttered, and highlight some of
the great technologies that the user has access to either directly, or over the
network, along with detailing how to get help [3] if required and access to
commercial support from a list of vendors offering it.

Where?
======
These are the locations I can think of off the top of my head - are there
others? Can we think outside the box of an improved experience that we don't
currently provide?

 o GRUB Splash
 o uname -a [!!?]
 o Login Screen
 o Login Splash (can we lose the icons/text?)
 o Desktop Background
 o Panel/menu setup
 o Desktop icon/window/widget theme
 o Firefox homepage
 o Desktop icons
 o Installer screens
 o Screensaver
 o Others?

When?
=====
With a preview release in Fall this year, it would be good at the very least to
map out the various locations that we definitely want to brand, though the
content will likely be very different (think 'Alpha' rather than a final
product). We may want to set proper expectations for people trying it out this
preview release and how the brand might effect that. Frank Ludolph has some
thoughts on some of this, and I think he has done some initial work on putting
some bits and pieces together that has addressed some of these ideas. Hopefully
he will update us on it soon.

This might be a discussion that we could have at the OpenSolaris summit, and
have a break-off working group. Cc'ing advocacy-discuss since it's likely to be
a topic of interest, but setting the reply-to indiana-discuss where the
conversation should continue.


Thoughts, suggestions?

Glynn

[1] http://www.gnome.org/~gman/gui-install/screen9.png
[2] file:///usr/share/doc/soldevex/html/developer_guide.html
[3] http://www.opensolaris.org/os/newbies
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