On Mon, Jul 27, 1998 at 01:25:26PM +0100, Enrique Zanardi wrote: > I fail to see which project goal should be changed. And a few > individuals's contributions have done a lot to improve the ease of use of > the system, just look at apt, our current consistent keyboard config, > menu, dwww, pppconfig and so on... Now all we need is someone with skill and reason to do the same for X! That's IMO the last big place we need to have easier install---and that should be IMO text based (slang) and be somewhat reminiscent of the wfw setup program. Perhaps superprobe and gpm as well as possibly existing XF86Config could provide defaults.. No idea what to do yet for a modeline calculator other than that we should be able to take a res/refresh rate and translate that into something sane. I have ideas on that but due to technical complexity of the code that would be involved it's merely ideas at the moment. The rest of it I have a much more detailled set of ideas on the layout of options and the like. If anyone is interested, let me know.. > And about concerted efforts, Debian is all about it. Explain the problem, > backing it with facts, let the other developers know about it, and you'll > soon find a lot of helping hands. (I admit sometimes the hard part is > just explaining the problem so that everyone understands what one's > talking about). :-) The problem above is that now things like ppp are easy, but things like X are still a nightmare if your system doesn't happen to be REALLY simple with a M$-style mouse on ttyS0, video card happens to be mentioned by name, and monitor doesn't conform to one of those defaults that many monitors can use. xf86config is evil to expect a newbie to follow. It makes make config on a linux kernel easy by comparison. If you screw something up with it, you start all over. My solution to the problem is the same as the solution to the kernel's make menuconfig.. A text interface that will let you back up and change settings if you have need and possibly provides reasonable defaults based on what can be determined by your hardware. That I think it should resemble WFW setup in many ways is just a user comfort thing and because I think the WFW approach was the right way to do it, or at least on the right track. It probably could just use whiptail, but I think it could be done somewhat nicer if someone knows any C.. Really with the slang module for perl, it could be done in that too. =>
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