Re: Four small programming tasks for this version or the next.

[JF Martinez <jfm2@club-internet.fr>]

> 
> JF Martinez wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > 1) The PPP configurator used for installation has a pathetically bad
> >     UI and in addition doesn't configure DNS.  Fix it.
> 
> I think that the whole ppp configurator has to be
> rewritten. We are going to start doing it after 4 weeks.
> I will be (at least partly) based on kppp.
> 

The problem is we need a PPP configurator _now_ and that means it must
be curses based.  One of the things Indy differs of your average
distribution is that it tries to help people who are self-teaching.
Most of them use Linux at home and until they get PPP working they
cannot ask for help.  So we really need a decent PPP configurator for
this edition not for the next.

> > 
> > 2) Handling conflicts in installation.  This would allow us to ship
> >     some software we can't ship now because it would conflict with
> >     some other software we are shipping.
> 
> Is this the problem with rh install installing rpms in
> alphabetical order?

No.  Alphabetical order can be dependency problem: a package needing
perl for its install scripts and because perl is later in alphabetical
order the scripts cannot be run.

The problem I was thinking of was about two mail agents: you cannot
install both because they share the same port and you have to manage
to install only one even in case the user selects "install all" nad
manage to do this without prompting and reprompting the user until he
feels dizzy.

> 
> We will also solve this by making a new installer. There
> will be differend sets of rpms: pre-install, install and
> post-install. Post-install rpms will be language dependent.
> 
> The installer will be ready for testing within 2 months.
> 

Caldera has a clean way to handle the problem of install scripts
requiring software who has still not been installed: they install
without running the scripts and run them all at the end of install
once everything is present.

> > 
> > 4) There is a little trick who can double or trebble the graphic
> > performùance of the box with modern processors.  Some games become
> > fast to be played.  :-) This is shell work but we need to hack
> > Xconfigurator in order to collect some data needed
> 
> What kind of hack?
> 

It involves reading /proc/pci (or stil betterthe output of lspci) in
order to know where is the memory used by the graphics card, but you
need to know the amount of memory used by the card and this is not
given by /proc/pci so you need Xconfigurator writing the info
somewhere. Once you know this, you just write the info in a file under
/proc and suddenly your game becomes _fast_.  This would allow us to
boast about Indy being the fastest distribution in the West: faster
than Stampede and Mandrake despite their use of pgcc.  :-)


-- 
			Jean Francois Martinez

Project Independence: Linux for the Masses
http://www.independence.seul.org