Re: SEUL: SEUL duplicating efforts?

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

On Sat, 14 Feb 1998, Erik Walthinsen wrote:

> As for the 'loop of death', you've aptly named it.  In fact, I discovered 
> just such a thing yesterday at work.  My friend's computer (dual PPro-120) 
> was recently installed with RedHat 5.0 (which he's slowly starting to 
> regret, because of all the little things that're broken), 

Hah! I feel his pain, believe me! The reason why I'm jumping on all
possible design flaws here is that each time, RedHat hype some new release
that will change the world, and then ship something that feels like a
beta, and some of the probs are so simple that you feel like you are the
first person to use the distro (-: I doubt that it's possible to set up
redhat without using a shell ... 

> terminal, but he, for obvious reasons, hadn't installed or configured a 
> local X server.  Guess what we found?  A 250MB+ log file with 160,000+ 
> iterations of X saying "there's no xf86config file!".  He never noticed it 

which reminds me... another annoyance with log files. Newbies would love
it if there was some kind of daemon that checked up on the logfiles and
deleted them once they were too old or too large, and some kind of ulimit 
like thing  on the logfiles to stop them getting too huge. Some kind of
expiration procedure related to size & time ? .

BTW, perhaps a partitioning scheme could be
designed, and the setup program could assign 'default' partitions based on
the diskspace the user wants to give to linux. (this is a wierd idea. just
brainstorming...)

or at least a  'happy-dialogue box' that recommends that the user create
certain partitions
/ , /usr , /home , /var ,  swap

Disk druid is a little less intimidating than fdisk, possibly a good place
to start with.

Your friend wouldn't have
run out of disk space if he had /var on a different file system to
everything else.

> > 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.
> A slightly smarter mechanism could be constructed that would allow any user 
> to shut down the machine if no one else is using it.  A quick check of 
> running processes and logged in users would decide whether the user can 
> shut it down from the login prompt with their own login/passwd, or it'll 
> have to be force by the superuser.

you'd want to keep this configurable. I bet some people would be dead set
against this. But for SEUL's goals, it seems reasonable to default to it.

> > 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. 
> OK, people need to try out all these editors, gather screen shots, and 
> write up details technical and opinion papers on them.  They will go to the 
> website.  We *must* do these things.  Without them we'll fail.

Cool. I'll play with some text editors. I'll post when I've some reviews
and screenshots. I'll stick the screenshots on my webpage (to avoid
posting graphics to the list)
 > 
> Which is precisely what we must avoid.  

exactly what I was getting at.

-- Donovan