Hal and DragonFly

[Robert Luciani]

Matthew Dillon wrote:
>     Hey, great work!
> 
>     For our January release I would like to do a DVD release expanded on
>     the SOC project (in addition to our standard CD release).  Does anyone
>     know the current status of that SOC project?  I played with it when
>     the SOC project ended and it looked like a good basis on which we could
>     add another dozen or two packages from pkgsrc.
> 
> 					-Matt
> 					Matthew Dillon 
> 					<dillon at backplane.com>

My plan is to pick up on it in 2 weeks (after exams). I would like to include
Gnome on it but first have to fix glib which is broken and prevents metacity
from building. Hasso sent me links a while ago to some patches which should lead
the way. A good thing about hal is that it will let us have super-handy features
like "nm-applet" which auto-configures everything that has to do with network.

Two things which would could be done further down the line if time permits is
porting tmpfs from NetBSD and some compression method. Already now a 4.7Gb DVD
can easily be filled with just a few popular GUI programs.

I do think we should skip autodetection of X graphics cards and just go the vesa
way like we do now. Not even Ubuntu & Co get this one right.

As an interesting side-note though, Fedora recently introduced kernel based
graphics mode setting into their latest distribution, which (with the support of
Xorg and others) seems to be the way things are headed.

-- 
Robert Luciani
Chalmers University of Technology, SWE
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
http://www.rluciani.com/rluciani.asc