Public Relations

sullivanva · 2005-08-16 19:54:57

How does one get a posting on slashdot.org and those other computer news info sites?

I see stuff there all the time about Debian.

A little free publicity couldn't hurt. The way I see it, Arch writes some piece about how Arch is doing this or that, and then we go to the variious newsites and send them links.

Sample story ideas:

1) The Arch Philosophy: KISS it or leave it
2) Win a date with cactus. Is he animal, vegetable, or mineral?

Below. Some women admiring Mr. Cactus.

BartL · 2005-08-16 20:03:03

Below. Some women admiring Mr. Cactus.

Oooh, it's so HUGE!

iBertus · 2005-08-16 20:04:54

BartL wrote:

Below. Some women admiring Mr. Cactus.
Oooh, it's so HUGE!
But really, the idea itself is great, now we just need some news

:shock:

Seems cactus is popular with people wearing purple t-shirts.... maybe a cactus lovers cult?

arooaroo · 2005-08-16 20:44:36

sullivanva wrote:

A little free publicity couldn't hurt. The way I see it, Arch writes some piece about how Arch is doing this or that, and then we go to the variious newsites and send them links.

I was actually thinking of writing another piece for OSNews (I've written a few for them this year). I intend to write a follow up to my original A Week in the Life of an Arch Linux Newbie article which charted my initial experience with the distro. That article appeared on OSNews and was linked to by Slashdot and Newsforge, amongst many others, so it definitely created some attention.

However, my motivation wouldn't be for publicity, it's purely for information.

cactus · 2005-08-16 20:54:31

sepht · 2005-08-16 21:32:36

Phrak is hot. It should be "win a date with phrak"

arooaroo · 2005-08-16 21:58:17

sepht wrote:

Phrak is hot.

Phrak - I think you've scored!

sullivanva · 2005-08-17 01:03:37

Did you know that when you Google "Arch Linux", you get:

Web Results 1 - 10 of about 2,220,000 for Arch Linux. (0.14 seconds)
Arch Linux
Arch Linux has been a disaster for some time now. ... July 14, 2005. [INT][PKG]: scim + gcim in [extra] ...
archlinux.org/ - 27k - Cached - Similar pages

I may have left off "All, The use of qmail with", but you get my point.

Negativity is just bad. OK?

Cotton · 2005-08-17 11:38:47

Someone needs to change the Arch home page to ensure the Google spider picks up a more relevant description of the distro.

At least Yahoo gets it right.

cactus · 2005-08-17 17:20:29

yeah. changing the tagline at the very top to
"Arch Linux is an i686-optimized distribution" should be enough to have google return that first.

Dusty · 2005-08-17 17:41:32

sullivanva wrote:

A little free publicity couldn't hurt.

I disagree....

magnum_opus · 2005-08-17 19:32:16

i got it into my head a bit ago (though i probably won't do it myself) that some one should write an arch review/article with a heavy focus on the tools that the community has created. Archie (i suppose because of hwd/lshwd) being that fastest booting live cd i know of, beating even the mini-cd distros. Back when eugenia still ran OSnews and was doing archlinux articles her main complaint was that arch lacked an equivalent to checkinstall, which we now have a couple of. as well as the various pacman mods: srcpac, the gui frontends, libpypac, and things like qpkg/aurbuild which essentially add another 1000 packages to the repo's (well as far as people who don't want to mess with ABS are concerned). I mean not everything is fully mature, but we've made some cool utilities that make arch more attractive to those who are looking for a reasonably simple system with a good package manager instead of a wizard-less KISS distro.

xerxes2 · 2005-08-17 21:10:44

yeah, as long as arch attracts developers we'll be just fine,

brain0 · 2005-08-17 22:17:04

sullivanva wrote:

I see stuff there all the time about Debian.
A little free publicity couldn't hurt. The way I see it, Arch writes some piece about how Arch is doing this or that, and then we go to the variious newsites and send them links.

Arch is not Debian. That's one of the many reasons I'm using it.

IMO, if someone really wants to use Arch, he/she will eventually find it. But if Arch becomes more popular, probably many users will use Arch that don't really want to use it (and we don't want them to use Arch either).

The good thing about Arch is that there's a community of competent users - users that don't have to be attracted by articles on slashdot.

sullivanva · 2005-08-17 22:52:35

You're thinking of marketing and publicity as a bad thing.
You have to understand who you want to connect with, and how best to reach them.

You don't write articles and say, "Hey, this is easy as pie." You explain the appeal of Arch.
The reason I say this is because I hadn't heard of Arch until recently.

I almost went with Gentoo. If I'd done that, I'd still be building my box right now.
You get more of the kind of people who can help Arch.

I understand the idea of growing slowly. There's going to be plenty who will find it not to their taste. But the thing I like best about Arch is that it encourages learning, and becoming part of a community. The community may be a bit cranky from time to time, but so's my Grandpa.

rasat · 2005-08-18 04:24:34

xerxes2 wrote:

yeah, as long as arch attracts developers we'll be just fine,

Hmmm... what's the point/value if end-users will not utilize Arch or it's developments.

Having devs we learn/get new things, but in the end all developers want to contribute and know if the developments are utilized. Not of selfish interest, though there are people who do, but for the sake of feedback for further developments.

There is an essential "dev & end-user" relationship what has to be maintained if wanting a development to progress. How to maintain this relationship, I think this is what we are here speaking about.

UnWorldly · 2005-08-18 15:24:15

Well one thing we could do is expand the available software so that people looking into arch for a specific purpose can easily find the software they need. Obviosly we should try to do the more popular specializations. Things like multimedia creation could use a few important programs but at the moment there are issues with building alot of them and they seem to be really tedious things that we don't currently have the resouces to support because the existing devs would rather do other work.

There are a lot of users out there who want packages that arch does not have and that are hard to build, it seems right now we are a bit heavy on end users and light on developers, I think if we can satisfy some more of the demands then more people will switch distros.

A little news couldn't hurt either, but it shouldn't be pointless stuff because alot of the slashdot kids are sick of reading pointless debian stories as you can see from reading alot of their comments.

I think things are really doing fine at the moment, more programs are becomming available and more people are ending their distro-hopping here, the aggresive advocacy campaigns do more harm then good alot of the time, and Arch doesnt seem to be one of those distros that is hell-bent on world domination anyway. I think Arch is easy enough to find for the people that want to find it, I like the current level of promotion and don't think it should increase too much.

phrakture · 2005-08-18 16:12:10

UnWorldly wrote:

Well one thing we could do is expand the available software so that people looking into arch for a specific purpose can easily find the software they need. Obviosly we should try to do the more popular specializations. Things like multimedia creation could use a few important programs but at the moment there are issues with building alot of them and they seem to be really tedious things that we don't currently have the resouces to support because the existing devs would rather do other work.

That's exactly what the AUR is for - if you want a program, either request it in the forum, or make a PKGBUILD yourself - put it in the AUR and given enough votes it's in community.

Dusty · 2005-08-18 17:57:42

rasat wrote:

Hmmm... what's the point/value if end-users will not utilize Arch or it's developments.

To improve it for the developer's own personal use.

Having devs we learn/get new things, but in the end all developers want to contribute and know if the developments are utilized. Not of selfish interest, though there are people who do, but for the sake of feedback for further developments.

I suppose there are some rather odd selfless devs like that out there, but I think most good open source developers follow the scratch an itch philosophy. They want to supply features they will use. Its not much fun debugging and testing features you don't even care about.

There is another sort of 'developer' out there who's primary goal is to develop the next 'killer app' and become really famous -- the next Linus. I mostly call these people 'kids'. ;-)

There is an essential "dev & end-user" relationship what has to be maintained if wanting a development to progress.

Nah. I think you're trying to apply an idea where it really doesn't exist. At all. In commercial development, the developers often never meet the end users, although new development "methodologies" (as my dumb textbooks call them) are trying to devise things like "end user development". In open source development, the end user IS the developer, plus anybody else that happens to appreciate his work.

There's also people paid to work on open source projects now, they don't fit this IS A relationship, but they don't do it out of the goodness of their heart either.

As an example of what I mean, the Arch devs don't include features into Arch because somebody asked for them (think GUI pacman....). They include features into Arch because somebody asked for them and somebody on the dev team thought "hey that's a good idea, I would use that if it was implemented, I think I'll implement it." (Think backgrounding daemon processes).

Dusty

rasat · 2005-08-19 05:13:32

Nicely said! I like the idea of "killer apps" and how to define the concept of "dev & user" relationship. It may sound a bit self-centric. But without self-motivation, its not easy to work.

For my information, what keeps in general the open source developers less selfish than the commercial devs, what I have observed. Is it because its open and at the end there is no defined "inventor", no "name and fame". Its a good thing if selfishness can be moderated in this way. Motivates the developers but not getting out of hand. Selfish can be very destructive.

Arch Linux

#1 2005-08-16 19:54:57

Public Relations

#2 2005-08-16 20:03:03

Re: Public Relations

#3 2005-08-16 20:04:54

Re: Public Relations

#4 2005-08-16 20:44:36

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#5 2005-08-16 20:54:31

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#6 2005-08-16 21:32:36

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#7 2005-08-16 21:58:17

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#8 2005-08-17 01:03:37

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#9 2005-08-17 11:38:47

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#10 2005-08-17 17:20:29

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#11 2005-08-17 17:41:32

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#12 2005-08-17 19:32:16

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#15 2005-08-17 22:52:35

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#16 2005-08-18 04:24:34

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#17 2005-08-18 15:24:15

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#18 2005-08-18 16:12:10

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#19 2005-08-18 17:57:42

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#20 2005-08-19 05:13:32

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