Drawing graphics on terminal

[Paul Robinson]

On Wed, Jun 18, 2003 at 06:23:42PM +0300, Samy Al Bahra wrote:

> A plugin-based architecture will allow us to choose between various UIs
> (ncurses, QT, etc...).

Yup. Trick is to make the plugins as user-definable as possible. The trick 
here (and i've said this elsewhere, probably uk-users) is that an OEM should 
find it easier to ship customer FreeBSD boxes than Linux or Windows. That 
way, you get more users. More users, more visibility. More visibility, more 
sponsorship for employing people full-time on FBSD. More people, more code. 
More code, better OS. Better OS, more users. Hey, isn't this where we came 
in? I'm just confused people are so hostile towards this... fair enough, 
it's time to stop talking and start coding, but even so...

Anyway, I'm rambling, but yes, highly modular, highly flexible, very 
lightweight in it's core but extendable. It's the way to go.
 
> Just as YaST, a libsysinstall can be provided to provide a standard UI
> API for applications to use + various UI plugins (ncurses, QT, GTK, Xaw,
> you name it) and configuration modules (users, network, ports, etc...).
> Though, before we all get excited about the possibilities of such an
> installer, what's happening with libh? Isn't it supposed to deal with
> all of sysintall's short-comings? All I see now is a lot of talk and no
> code, maybe such discussion should go to libh's mailing list (where we
> can talk design there)?

Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. This installer is dead. It is not pineing for 
the fd0s. :-)

YaST might be your route, it's not mine. It's cool, but I'm going to work on 
something.. different. I'll give a heads up on it if you want to see when 
the design is done, but I can't see live code coming out as production ready 
until sometime around August 2004, with rough betas heading out of my 
machine sometime around May 2004 - there's a lot of other stuff that needs 
to be done before then.... Designs will be done probably before September 
this year, depending on what happens this weekend in Cardiff at the uk-users 
10th birthday bash.
 
> marcus@ is working on this for GNOME's case ATL. A new splash screen for
> GNOME2 will be there soon (bunch of backgrounds hopefully soon). I
> really do believe all interested artists should come and work together
> to finish off a whole FreeBSD art pack (for use by KDE and GNOME2). We
> should look around for them, maybe create a mailing list of some sort
> for them and get them to work together.

I think getting a focused group together who want to get FBSD onto the 
desktop would be a good idea. At the moment, there is lots of talk about 
installers, package management, etc. including this thread, clogging up 
either -hackers or -chat. It's time to move off. I propose somebody, 
somewhere, sets up freebsd-user-friendly at freebsd.org where the more UI 
centric and "working towards user friendliness" discussions can occur.

-- 
Paul Robinson