Hal and DragonFly

[Bill Hacker]

Robert Luciani wrote:
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.
Ubuntu may not, but many others do - either with modular Xorg OR 
(NetBSD) even with XF86.

(*many* screen and graphics cards here).

A 1680 x 1050 or 1280 X 800 'native' beats all heck out of the same 
screen running a more-common  VESA substitute stretched to distortion.

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.
'..the way things are headed'

. . is that *eventually* there will be no more 'distros' because, as with 
the Foo Bird flying in circles of ever-decreasing radius until it 
ultimately flies up its own cloaca and disappears, the entire known 
universe will have finally made it into the Linux kernel.

That may have been what caused the *last* 'big bang'....

;-)