regarding 1:
there is "grml small" bootparam, which starts fewer consoles on startup
----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Schierl" schierlm-public@gmx.de To: grml@mur.at Sent: Sunday, November 05, 2006 7:03 PM Subject: [Grml] Suggestions
Hi,
some things I noticed when using grml 0.8 recently that might be changed some day to make grml even better:
1. When loading grml on older machines there is a noticable delay (and cdrom activity) when there are loaded lots of screen and zsh instances into the virtual consoles. I'd like to have a cheatcode (or a runlevel) that only loads programs for console 1 at startup. Other consoles are loaded after a key has been pressed there. For those consoles that use rungetty, its --prompt option could be used to archieve this.
2. Having GRUB available on GRML is great. However, I'd like to have a few "Grub keyboard layouts" included for people who, unlike me, cannot find all that special chars like = or / on an American keyboard layout. You can find a German and a French layout on my bootdisk (or its config files) available at http://home.arcor.de/mschierlm/bootdisk/. On the other hand, you can save about 1MB on CD by using a 360KB floppy image instead of a 1.44MB one. (I tested it and chainloading a 360KB GRUB disk image from memdisk works.)
3. When, for some reason, I need grml booted on two machines and cannot use the grml-terminalserver (for example because I may not interfere with DHCP servers in the network and do not have a crossover network cable with me either) I like to use the toram option. But, obviously, it needs lots of RAM and time to get started. In these cases grml-small would be better. But I want to carry around as few disks as possible. So I thought if it is possible to splitting the squashfs image into two images that are merged by unionfs, where the smaller one contains a basic system that includes all stuff from grml-small (which may be larger than 50MB, but as small as possible) and have a cheatcode to load only the small part into ram (and not use the large part at all). I do not know if this is feasible in the grml build process (obviously it will require some extra work of splitting the image), but it would be cool. I don't know any live cd that tries to do things like this, so perhaps it is not possible...?
4. The bootsplash flickers quite a lot. You might reduce flickering by replacing the »/usr/bin/clear« by »echo -ne '\033[H\033[25l'« which will not clear the screen but move the cursor to top and set the cursor invisible. Another nice thing would be having boot messages scrolling in a small "window" inside the bootsplash, like it can be done by »ESC [ first ; last r« (see »man console_codes | less +/region«), but since I do not know how many users are using bootsplash anyway (I usually do not), this is just eye-candy and very low priority for me :-)
Feel free to flame me now ;-)
Michael
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