Re: SEUL: SEUL duplicating efforts?

[Donovan Rebbechi <elflord@pegasus.rutgers.edu>]

> If SEUL is going to make any kind of dent in the market, we have to avoid 
> text mode as much as possible.  Granted, as stated below, it shouldn't be 
> ignored, because some machines just won't run X.  

agreed ...

> Upon boot, a properly configured SEUL installation on a capable machine 
> *will* start an X server, and present XDM or some similar login setup.

I'm not technically aware enough to say much more on this other than the
fact that it boils down to whether it's possible to catch xdm if it fails
at boot, or somehow detect the 'loop of death'. 

The other issue that could cause hassles is when X doesn't actually fail
but the video timings are
bad enough to make the monitor unusable (for example, blank
screen+squeal, or screen roll due to bad vertical timings) . xdm won't
restart,
but the display unusable , though X doesn't seem to 'realise' this. You
need some way of squashing this potential glitch too.

> Linux is that you have to log in to shutdown the machine cleanly.  Being 
> able to do so from the XDM login prompt will be a plus.

in fact the IRIX machines have such a thing. Moreover, they you can shut
them down as user, you are presented with a root password to shut it down,
and on success, the machine shuts down.

> There *should* be some work put into building a valid text-mode 
> configuration for people who either don't have the hardware for X, or just 
> don't like X.  However, it will not be the default, unless the X 
> configuration program determines that X just can't run.  Then it will 
> indeed become the default, as there is nothing else to be done.

Again, I guess it's for the programming gurus to work out how the machine
"knows" if X fails.
> 
> Given this, we need to make sure that we do indeed have a very user-friendly 
> editor, 

nedit is the nicest one I've seen so far. Feels a lot like wordpad.
Haven't really played with console editors other than emacs/vi/jed. 

> > That way, they just have to pick the "start X Windows" menu item and don't
> > even have to remember 'startx'.
> This is one more step that users don't need to take, so we shouldn't make 
> them.  Even Windoze 3.x would put 'win' at the end of autoexec.bat for you.
> 
> > There's no obvious need to have XDM fire up at boot time ...
> How many here have actually *used* XDM?  It doesn't seem like too many 
> people so far understand what it actually does.
 
I for one have used it. Root can change the run level. I'm not sure why
there's anything wrong with root manually changing the run level (sorry,
I'm a Simple End User (-" ), though
one wouldn't do haphazardly and spontaneously on a machine connected to
several terminals... of course it does create yet another step in the
initialisation process though. 

> started, usually some programs and a window manager.  The WM is always last 
> in the file, and is not backgrounded.  When the WM dies, the .xsession 
> script finishes, and XDM reclaims the X server to display the login prompt 
> again.

Hence the "loop of death" when X fails...

> > The idea of relying too heavily on X working at the drop of the hat seems
> > mildly risky at best.
> That's why we need to have text-mode fallbacks, and *good* ones, in case 
> this happens.  For instance, if we do a partially X-based install, there 
> must be a text-mode equivalent that will do *exactly* the same thing in 
> almost exactly the same way.

I guess this is the point I was trying to make. You said it better than I
did :-)

-- Donovan