system requirements linux

[Peter Alcibiades]

Richard Gaskin wondered about which distributions Rev apps will run on.  
Almost certainly any that any customer would have.  I've run them on DSL, 
Mandriva One KDE, Debian and the extraordinaily minimalist SliTaz, and one or 
two other live distros.  No-one is running anything below 2.4 kernel now.  
I've not yet found one it will not run on.

They will also run under a variety of window managers.  I have tried fluxbox, 
Gnome, KDE, Xfce WindowMaker and one or two of the tiling minimalist WMs like 
WMii and dwm and ion2.  It was fine.

The thing that is much more likely to be a problem than just does it run, is 
fonts.  Linux ships with a quite limited set, and you cannot count on the MS 
display fonts being there, so it might be prudent to either package any fonts 
used with the app, or else confine the app to the fonts you can be sure of 
having installed.  Also, its prudent to check that Rev can actually get at 
all the installed fonts in all sizes.  My experience is that on Debian at 
least it cannot.

Don't worry about emulating the Gnome window borders and stuff like that too 
closely.  They are going to have non-Gnome apps installed in any case, so 
they will be used to different styles.  Huge amounts of the HIG stuff that 
Mac users are used to considering part of the design of the OS interface is 
simply one option among many for Linux users and considered a matter of 
personal taste.

For instance, double click or single click to open a file.  Spatial browsing 
(multiple windows) versus browser style navigation.  Menu bar at top, bottom, 
both, left, right or none.   Right click on desktop to open the 'start' menu, 
versus having it someplace in a menu bar someplace.  Tiling versus overlay.  
Number of virtual desktops.....  Different file managers.   We are not in the 
world of "the Finder".

Written from Gnome, but on Kmail, and using xfe not Nautilus as the Finder, 
and sometimes KOffice rather than OO, for the sake of the excellent Kexi and 
frame oriented KWord.  As an example!

Peter