Re: SEUL: Re: What's the diff to SEUL ? (fwd)

[William T Wilson <fluffy@dunadan.com>]

On Sat, 17 Jan 1998, Star's End wrote:

> I see a fvwm window manager, with something in the install script to
> allow you to put the application you want into the system.fvwmrc if you
> want.

I think that if we could extend the fvwm95 interface so it's a little less
clunky, that may well be the best way.  Right now it LOOKS like Win95 but,
as I may have mentioned, it lacks a number of features present in the
genuine Win95.  No matter what you may say about the win95 interface, it
is certainly the most FAMILIAR...

> > I even recently saw a GUI interface for ipfwadm in c.o.l.a.
> Where is this?

I'd be interested in it too.  ipfwadm is one of those "magic command line
utilities" which would be a perfect model for that "properties tab" idea
I've been pushing.  :)

> What I see as the seul distribution is as follows:
> 	The base system - enough to boot into vga Xserver and pop up a nice
> 	gui to setup the real Xserver. I would suggest a tktcl script that
> 	runs at install time and asks the correct questions to setup your
> 	card and monitor in the XF85Config..

Me too.  The, uh, monitor database is one of the things I was going to be
working on, but although I obtained the database, I haven't gotten it all
parsed out yet.  It looks like it would not be too hard.

Me personally, I suggest tcl/tk for everything.  I love tcl/tk, even
though I don't know a thing about how to program it.  Does anyone here
actually know how to program in tcl/tk?

> 	Distributions of prefered applications that do automatic installs.
> 	This means that after installing an icon is added to a toolbar
> 	representing the application, or a menu item at the root menu.

Yes.  I think that adding the application to the toolbar should be a
function of our post-install script (I assume debian has one).  Similar,
the pre-uninstall script should take care of removing it from the
toolbar.

> 	Some people expressed interest in "extension" binding. You know that
> 	thing that when you click on x.doc in windows word for windows is
> 	launched with x.doc.

This, sadly, is going to be application dependent.  If an application does
not understand how to launch an initial file from the commandline, this
wont work; but if it does, it'll be very very easy.  It would be a
function of the filemanager, in any case.

> For practical purposes there other problems to contend with - repartition
> hard drives, adding swap space ( I believe a swap file is easier because

Repartitioning will be tricky.  I wonder if someone would like to port
FIPS to Linux?  The source is available, isn't it?

As for swap space - I don't like swap files, neither does very many
people, as their slowness is beyond compare and they are prone to
corruption.  Couldn't we just make a best guess as to the appropriate size
of the partition and let the user tweak it?