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

[George Bonser <grep@oriole.sbay.org>]

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

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

I am going to have to look, I am not sure if I saved the announcement :-/
> After taking an informal survey of what applications want to be run, I have
> concluded that the people interested are people who want a unix workstation,
> with a pre-configured X-windows system, and a suite of office 
> applications (word processor, spreadsheet, etc ...) and the ability to add
> there own specialized applications (scientific, artistic, development).

Oh, like the old Caldera Network Desktop had. 

> 	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..

<sigh>  This might actually be tough. We need a way to queary the card and
have enough "canned" setups to be able to see what hardware is being used
or ask the user the brand of the card (not the chipset).  Maybe something
that parses the output of SuperProbe but even that can be dangerous on
some cards. We then set up the card with some sane defaults and the user
can push it to the bleeding edge if they want to. Monitor type is
important too. Don't want to blow someones horizontal amplifier just
because we set a bad mode.

> 	Internet Connectivity. This includes dial-up installs and 
> 	ethernet installs.

This is where many distributions try to get too cute.  Look, if an ISP
will except a default Windows95 dialup without any scripting or input from
the user, then it will most likely accept a PAP Linux connection.  We just
put the username and password in the pap-secrets file, set up a sane
options file with the user supplying a baud rate and I/O port and modem
setup string and off we go. We just dial up the ISP, wait for CONNECT and
turn the connection over to PAP.

No need for cute dialup scripts like Red Hat and Slackware.

> 
> 	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.

Won't TkDesk do this?  I THINK filerunner will as well.


George Bonser 
If NT is the answer, you didn't understand the question. (NOTE: Stolen sig)
http://www.debian.org
Debian/GNU Linux ... the maintainable operating system.