SEUL: Idea for SEUL startup

[Claudio Leite <claudio@netspring.net>]

Hi there,

	I've just joined this mailing list, and I have a few ideas on how
this distribution could become friendlier: 

	1- Ditch sysvinit, write a new init.
		Why? When I was a newbie with Linux, i often wanted to
		start programs at bootup. But I had no clue on where to
		start. The /etc/rc.d (Slack, RH) and /etc/init.d (Debian) 
		are still too complicated for a normal user to understand.
		I'm thinking of something like Windows, where it starts up
		something like a menu, and this menu program starts up
		everything thats in the folder "StartUp". Hide all the 
		system init stuff, in a place where only the advanced user
		would be interested. Make this program look nice, with
		pretty little colors and menus (I've written a nice lib
		called libac which does the color and positioning job very
		well).

	2- Make a menu system default instead of a shell
		In my old DOS days, my father always set up a nice menu
		system so I could find all the programs I needed easily.
		I was quite unsure of what to do if a "C:\>" prompt came
		up on my face. Learning UNIX shells is harder than
		learning COMMAND.COM. My idea is to have the init call
		up a menu system, where you'd login, start up any of your
		programs through the menu, and if you wanted to, exit to
		bash or csh of whatever. Then a simple "exit" command
		would bring you back to the menu.

		Joey Hess' pdmenu would be a nice program to start with.

	These ideas were originally for my own Linux distribution, but
since I didn't have the time or expertise to do this (I'm 13, so I'm sorta
busy and don't have that much experience with UNIX), it never got really
far. I did have it working, including GCC & X, but without any of these
ideas.

	I'd code these programs myself, only  if someone told me why I
can't do two gets() or fgets() functions (the second just skips right by). Any ideas?

So, what do you guys think? I believe these would be good ideas, because
if you really want to compete with the mainstream OS's, borrowing ideas
from them is the only way to make it just as good.

Claudio


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