4 years of USETOOLS project
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alexsupra
Dec 14, 2010, 7:31:31 AM12/14/10
to news...@usetools.net
The project began in the cold december of 2006 as free software news
group. It was made for collecting the information about really useful
but free of charge software mainly for Windows platform. The quality
of chosen software was checked by volunteers by installation and
practical usage on many office and home computers. The most useful,
fast and smart ones were included in the first sofware packages made
by the project with some customizations of software configurations. So
it was the very begining.
Then we had not complete free software applications set for Windows to
provide full-featured workstation enviroment by installing only
USETOOLS software packages thus we had to use not only free but paid
software too like office applications, antivirus and so on. Actually
it was unbelievable in 2006 that it is really possible to provide
everything needed by users and system administrators with using of
free software on the base of the most popular operating system in the
world (which is still Windows XP). But nothing could stop us and one
more reason of going on and on appeared after the first year of the
practical experiments and investigations of various software. It was
assumption that commercial code is not so good as it should be but
proprietary license i.e. closed code and agressive marketing policy
help to hide it. The every day and night using of software with
various configurations on different machines with detailed reporting
resulted the appearing of fundamentally new knoledge based on practice
about things that illusory had seemed to be well-known earlier.
Approximately at the end of 2008 the project insiders got the
following useful information about the most popular non-free software
with proprietary licenses (in comparisson to free and open source
alternatives): this software is too bloated, very problematic,
consumes too much of system hardware resources and requires a lot of
time for maintenance and support. The main reason of this fact is
large companies which carried away too much with market control. Yes,
the control of the market and extra profits needed for it are the main
reasons of making all these new versions of products which bring more
and more problems and headache to users, system administrators, system
integrators, IT managers and other IT-related people. Especially for
those ones who havent any profits from sales of these products but
should use or support them. Please dont forget about so called format
wars, widely spread drm solutions and so on. They all consume too much
time of user and central processor that results additional costs but
reduce total perfomance of work. It sounds like anecdote but the main
concept of proprietary software especially made during the last years
is "you pay more, but get less".
USETOOLS project was made originally with usage of english language as
the primary one cause it is the most universal and perfectly suitable
for technical purpose. But the application of the project during all 4
years mainly took place in Russia. Thus the project got dual nature.
From the one hand there is integrated universal software and settings
installation system with advantaged features which is called USETOOLS
SYSINSTALL. It is made for russian version of Windows XP and brings
high optimized and universal overall system settings for getting high
perfomance, stability and security even in case of very weak and slow
hardware. And naturally it provides great package of free software
with customized configurations and profiles, settings patterns,
automation scripts, etc. This installation package appeared as high
experimental and insolent way to get clean, working, useful, fast and
smart enviroment including all the usage and maintenance experience
inside. SYSINSTALL became advanced alternative anti-crisis solution
that in case of proper employment allow to "pay less, but get more".
From the other hand some important components of mentioned above
installation package got some success in foreign countries. One of
them is alternative shell for Windows with implementing all of the
basic features of Explorer but making system work more fast and more
stable - UTBOX (USETOOLS BlackBox). Other valuable achievement was in
Windows drivers subsystem - GENERIC drivers pack (universal and clean
device drivers package). There are some other interesting things but
less popular.
The main USETOOLS news for today is that the project is alive =) but a
little bit silent outside the last period of time cause the great work
is going on inside and the leading engineers havent enough time to
make regular reports. The last 4 years were the years of hard working
and getting the new fundamental experience, we made smart things, we
made mistakes and we were studing on them again and again for getting
better results. So we were warming up, now its time to move things
further.
Thanks for all people inside and ouside USETOOLS project for more than
everything.
group. It was made for collecting the information about really useful
but free of charge software mainly for Windows platform. The quality
of chosen software was checked by volunteers by installation and
practical usage on many office and home computers. The most useful,
fast and smart ones were included in the first sofware packages made
by the project with some customizations of software configurations. So
it was the very begining.
Then we had not complete free software applications set for Windows to
provide full-featured workstation enviroment by installing only
USETOOLS software packages thus we had to use not only free but paid
software too like office applications, antivirus and so on. Actually
it was unbelievable in 2006 that it is really possible to provide
everything needed by users and system administrators with using of
free software on the base of the most popular operating system in the
world (which is still Windows XP). But nothing could stop us and one
more reason of going on and on appeared after the first year of the
practical experiments and investigations of various software. It was
assumption that commercial code is not so good as it should be but
proprietary license i.e. closed code and agressive marketing policy
help to hide it. The every day and night using of software with
various configurations on different machines with detailed reporting
resulted the appearing of fundamentally new knoledge based on practice
about things that illusory had seemed to be well-known earlier.
Approximately at the end of 2008 the project insiders got the
following useful information about the most popular non-free software
with proprietary licenses (in comparisson to free and open source
alternatives): this software is too bloated, very problematic,
consumes too much of system hardware resources and requires a lot of
time for maintenance and support. The main reason of this fact is
large companies which carried away too much with market control. Yes,
the control of the market and extra profits needed for it are the main
reasons of making all these new versions of products which bring more
and more problems and headache to users, system administrators, system
integrators, IT managers and other IT-related people. Especially for
those ones who havent any profits from sales of these products but
should use or support them. Please dont forget about so called format
wars, widely spread drm solutions and so on. They all consume too much
time of user and central processor that results additional costs but
reduce total perfomance of work. It sounds like anecdote but the main
concept of proprietary software especially made during the last years
is "you pay more, but get less".
USETOOLS project was made originally with usage of english language as
the primary one cause it is the most universal and perfectly suitable
for technical purpose. But the application of the project during all 4
years mainly took place in Russia. Thus the project got dual nature.
From the one hand there is integrated universal software and settings
installation system with advantaged features which is called USETOOLS
SYSINSTALL. It is made for russian version of Windows XP and brings
high optimized and universal overall system settings for getting high
perfomance, stability and security even in case of very weak and slow
hardware. And naturally it provides great package of free software
with customized configurations and profiles, settings patterns,
automation scripts, etc. This installation package appeared as high
experimental and insolent way to get clean, working, useful, fast and
smart enviroment including all the usage and maintenance experience
inside. SYSINSTALL became advanced alternative anti-crisis solution
that in case of proper employment allow to "pay less, but get more".
From the other hand some important components of mentioned above
installation package got some success in foreign countries. One of
them is alternative shell for Windows with implementing all of the
basic features of Explorer but making system work more fast and more
stable - UTBOX (USETOOLS BlackBox). Other valuable achievement was in
Windows drivers subsystem - GENERIC drivers pack (universal and clean
device drivers package). There are some other interesting things but
less popular.
The main USETOOLS news for today is that the project is alive =) but a
little bit silent outside the last period of time cause the great work
is going on inside and the leading engineers havent enough time to
make regular reports. The last 4 years were the years of hard working
and getting the new fundamental experience, we made smart things, we
made mistakes and we were studing on them again and again for getting
better results. So we were warming up, now its time to move things
further.
Thanks for all people inside and ouside USETOOLS project for more than
everything.
4 years of USETOOLS project is tomorrow: 15 december 2010.
alexsupra
Dec 14, 2010, 10:50:43 AM12/14/10
to usetools
So what are the main directions of USETOOLS project for today? Lets
consider them.
The latest stable version of SYSINSTALL for now is 2.99-i3. The
designation by letters appeared cause when 2.999 was out it had some
bugs (connected with drivers) that needed to be fixed. Thus 2.x was
extended with using of letters i.e. 2.99-xy, where [x] - letter A-Z,
[y] - digit 0-9.
Then after bugs fix-up the regular updates of installation system were
paused in early october and it was being tested on wide variety of
configurations during 2 months by the project insiders and outsiders
and now it is considered to be surely stable. The further development
of SYSINSTALL is going on but the public releases will be available
next year due to the complete project reconstruction on the base of
overall feedback that we got during the last years. It means the
movement to the next level of quality and usefullness in different
scales. I can explain what is meant here by the following plan with
brief descriptions.
1. Rewriting of scripts and configuration settings for multipurpose
usage i.e. providing of ability to use smart USETOOLS solutions
independently and separately of the main package. Thats why some
pieces of code are being published over the internet and developed as
stand alone ones.
2. Rewriting of scripts and configuration settings that are applied to
system in more neat way e.g. adding of uninstallers, using own root
directory instead of %systemroot%\system32, etc.
3. Reconstructing of scripts and configuration settings for
multilanguage usage i.e. providing of both english and russian support
with auto-detection based on what language is default on target
system.
4. Reconstructing of software packages for providing 2 easy ways of
deployment: to fetch the latest (or some special) version of binaries
from internet, to keep binary part of application for offline
installation. The same idea is for using of configuration settings:
possibility to use offline variant of configuration settings or to
fetch the latest ones from usetools.net
5. Running compatibility tests not only in Windows XP but also in
Linux Wine and ReactOS.
To be continued...
consider them.
The latest stable version of SYSINSTALL for now is 2.99-i3. The
designation by letters appeared cause when 2.999 was out it had some
bugs (connected with drivers) that needed to be fixed. Thus 2.x was
extended with using of letters i.e. 2.99-xy, where [x] - letter A-Z,
[y] - digit 0-9.
Then after bugs fix-up the regular updates of installation system were
paused in early october and it was being tested on wide variety of
configurations during 2 months by the project insiders and outsiders
and now it is considered to be surely stable. The further development
of SYSINSTALL is going on but the public releases will be available
next year due to the complete project reconstruction on the base of
overall feedback that we got during the last years. It means the
movement to the next level of quality and usefullness in different
scales. I can explain what is meant here by the following plan with
brief descriptions.
1. Rewriting of scripts and configuration settings for multipurpose
usage i.e. providing of ability to use smart USETOOLS solutions
independently and separately of the main package. Thats why some
pieces of code are being published over the internet and developed as
stand alone ones.
2. Rewriting of scripts and configuration settings that are applied to
system in more neat way e.g. adding of uninstallers, using own root
directory instead of %systemroot%\system32, etc.
3. Reconstructing of scripts and configuration settings for
multilanguage usage i.e. providing of both english and russian support
with auto-detection based on what language is default on target
system.
4. Reconstructing of software packages for providing 2 easy ways of
deployment: to fetch the latest (or some special) version of binaries
from internet, to keep binary part of application for offline
installation. The same idea is for using of configuration settings:
possibility to use offline variant of configuration settings or to
fetch the latest ones from usetools.net
5. Running compatibility tests not only in Windows XP but also in
Linux Wine and ReactOS.
To be continued...
alexsupra
Dec 14, 2010, 2:14:40 PM12/14/10
to usetools
Some words about updates of web resources.
Maybe you allready noticed that group doesnt provide the information
about software updates. Now USETOOLS software news have more clean and
brief form and they are being posted at Twitter http://twitter.com/usetools
Just look on these tweets, they are awesome! Only the chosen ones
among free of charge and open source software tools.
All of the news including software updates on Twitter, published works
on deviantArt, new topics in this group and some other resources are
collected in RSS news channel http://feeds.feedburner.com/usetools
What about new purpose of this USETOOLS Google group?
One of the very important directions of the project activity is
providing the powerful feedback (feature requests, bug reports, etc.)
to the software developers. all USETOOLS project members will be able
to make posts inside USETOOLS Google group for providing information
and links to feedback messages made on software support forums. Here
we can discuss and review features, bugs and any kind of useful
information concerning the software used in USETOOLS to help the
developers with high quality feedback.
USETOOLS Google group: http://groups.google.com/group/usetools
If you have problem with writing comment or creating new post please
message me alex...@usetools.net and we will resolve this issue.
Stay tuned.
Maybe you allready noticed that group doesnt provide the information
about software updates. Now USETOOLS software news have more clean and
brief form and they are being posted at Twitter http://twitter.com/usetools
Just look on these tweets, they are awesome! Only the chosen ones
among free of charge and open source software tools.
All of the news including software updates on Twitter, published works
on deviantArt, new topics in this group and some other resources are
collected in RSS news channel http://feeds.feedburner.com/usetools
What about new purpose of this USETOOLS Google group?
One of the very important directions of the project activity is
providing the powerful feedback (feature requests, bug reports, etc.)
to the software developers. all USETOOLS project members will be able
to make posts inside USETOOLS Google group for providing information
and links to feedback messages made on software support forums. Here
we can discuss and review features, bugs and any kind of useful
information concerning the software used in USETOOLS to help the
developers with high quality feedback.
USETOOLS Google group: http://groups.google.com/group/usetools
If you have problem with writing comment or creating new post please
message me alex...@usetools.net and we will resolve this issue.
Stay tuned.
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