Re: SEUL: Is it too soon for me to comment?

[Erik Walthinsen <omega@omegacs.net>]

> What about LyX?  Wordperfect?  Hasn't CorelDRAW been ported, too?  xcalc,
> xload, date.....  Lynx?  Arena?(Blech) xtrek? Quake?  DOOM?
Yes, applications exist.  Many exist.  But people don't know that yet.  And 
many of them aren't exactly user-friendly anyway.  There's also the issue of 
interface.  Apps exist, but they all look different, requiring some very 
funky configuration.  A dozen toolkits, two dozen configuration files, and no 
way to tie them all together.

> Same prob with Win95, it's called "disk caching".  I trust you remember
> what it is...  Speeds things up more than you might realize.
I think what he means in doing fsync()'s on specific files very often during 
the process of configuring the system.  And lots of error checking.  I've 
heard that if your root filesystem is full (don't do that!), and some user 
goes to change their password, it tries to rewrite the passwd file and 
fails, so guess what?  No more passwd file.  Very, very bad.

> Maybe RedHat missed something, 'cause they've been distributing the JDK
> with their distrib since 4.2.
And people have been complaining about problems and bugs ever since.  I'm not 
sure this is the fault of RedHat, at least not wholly.  Java has its own 
problems, and you couple bazaar-style development with a non-quite-yet 
standard language and JVM, and you're bound to have problems.

> It depends on whether the ISP supports PAP or not.
> If they do, just do as such:
If they do, they should be able to enter a username, password, phone number, 
and hit enter, just like Windoze.

> Not really...  IIRC, Win uses PAP, right?  Grabbing the password and
> username from a doubtless encrypted file with PERL?
DUN scripting doesn't use PAP or variants.  It's basically the exact same 
thing as chat, though likely a different syntax.  A conversion to perl would 
be trivial, and would save many people much time.  How many ISP's you know 
that hand out appropriate chat scripts?  How many hand out DUN-scripting 
info (if applicable)?  

> Not in my experience, AAMOF a friend of mine(Linux newbie, but not a
> newbie to computing) installed RH4.2, selected "Install Everything" and he
> didn't have a single problem.
It depends on what you're trying to do.  Certain things work fine, and have 
for a long time.  Others break badly in certain circumstances.  And there's 
the obvious case where there isn't enough hard drive space.

> > Windows takes five minutes, less if you just pick 'typical'.  We need a
> > similar setup.
> Ha ha, what kind of computer you talking about?  Win95 install takes AT
> LEAST 15 minutes, with lots of baby sitting...  RedHat has recently come
> up with an installer called "KickStart", shove the boot disk in A:, put
> the CD in the drive, reboot and walk away, not even Win95 can boast that.
He's talking about deciding what components to install.  The install itself 
will obviously take longer, and shouldn't require any babysitting.

> Okay, now for my one gripe:  XFree86.
This is solvable, I think.  Using careful probing, you can discover most of 
the things you need, and when it comes down to looking for frequencies, as 
for a monitor type.  There are enough Linux people out there that I'm sure we 
could post a request for information and we'd get back numbers for the vast 
majority of all monitors in existance.

> Going to try vertical frequency range xx-xx next...
> I screen will come up, if it looks scrambled answer 'no' to the question
> after it goes away.  If the screen does not go away after three minutes,
> press CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE.
I think some things like Xconfigurator already do this.  Though note that 
ctrl-atl-backspace won't work.  If the X server hasn't cleaned up the screen 
within three minutes, killing it certainly won't help.  Most likely the 
screen will never make its way out of whatever mode it's in.  In this case, 
you basically have to reboot and start over.

This is where a restartable install would be very useful.  Or better yet, 
keep X server binaries live on the CD, so the X configuration can happen 
*before* we try to do anything else.  A restartable install is still a very 
good idea.

TTYL,
    Omega

     Erik Walthinsen <omega@seul.org> - SEUL Project system architect
        __
       /  \                SEUL: Simple End-User Linux -
      |    | M E G A            Creating a Linux distribution
      _\  /_                         for the home or office user