March really sucks. It lures you in with 60 degrees and sun and then it turns around and betrays you with snow. Bah.
A number of people, even people at Ximian, have come up to me and asked me about Project Utopia. A few people asked at the Mono summit so I figured I’d post a description of it here.
Project Utopia is really an umbrella project of a bunch of smaller open-source projects. Included are the 2.6 Linux kernel, udev, HAL, and other policy pieces like gnome-volume-manager.
From the end-user perspective, the idea here is plug-and-play in the non-techinical sense. When you plug in a piece of hardware, it should Just Work. We need to meet or exceed the functionality of Windows and Mac OS X here, and this is a component of the Linux desktop that has really fallen behind the others.
More technically, if the user or the programmer ever has to use device nodes (ie, “/dev/video”), we’ve failed in our mission. Instead of having to probe SCSI busses for writable CD drives, applications should be able to query for them uniformly. Printers should either bring up a wizard-like thingy to help them configure it, assuming it doesn’t just work automatically.
(more about this later…)