Drawing graphics on terminal

[Samy Al Bahra]

If we adopt a dl-based framework for the installer, we can shrink it
down pretty much to whatever size we want (and memory usage can be less.
YaST, one of the most feature-packed installers out there (SuSE) takes
up less RAM than sysinstall!). This also gives us the ability to have
plugins across various floppies.


> - The project will never agree what is required of the installer, as 
> everybody has their own agenda. Some see FBSD as a server OS that could do 
> desktop, others want to push it forward as generic "one-fits-all" OS that's 
> as good at desktop work as it is at server work. The installer needs to be 
> able to mirror the user's wishes there and then.

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

> - Whether the installer is graphical or not is not the issue. Grey boxes on
> a blue background with yellow, red and black text is just plain ugly to a
> society that understands art and interior design. I know you're limited on
> pallet due to the restrictions of the console, but you can make sysinstall
> nicer just by changing the colour scheme. You can make it a hell of a lot 
> nicer by making it consistent and functionally useful.

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)?

> - The KDE and Gnome stuff going on around FBSD, in my opinion, needs a 
> helping hand or three so that when somebody installs KDE on FBSD, there is 
> FBSD related stuff in the menus, FBSD themes, the whole lot, a la Redhat, 
> Mandrake, and so on. This is not dumbing down. This is helping people who 
> want to run a fancy window manager get the most out of their system. It 
> helps advocacy. And besides, those guys could do with the help anyway, it's 
> a lonely thankless job, and yet it has one of the biggest potential impacts 
> on manager and/or investor perception.

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.


-- 
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| Samy Al Bahra | samy at kerneled.com |
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Arabeyes.org Kerneled.com FreeBSD.org