* Michael Schierl schierlm-public@gmx.de [20061105 19:15]:
some things I noticed when using grml 0.8 recently that might be changed some day to make grml even better:
- 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.
As already mentioned on the mailing list, take a look at booting with "grml small".
I really like your idea with the --prompt option and integrated it: http://hg.grml.org/grml-etc/rev/db04e8e2294e
- 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.)
I like your allinone.img! Are you interested in inclusion into main grml? If so please feel free to contact me (just write me a personal mail or join #grml on freenode).
- 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...?
Interesting idea. I'll add it to the todolist and will discuss it with other developers.
- 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 :-)
Excellent feedback! Already incorporated: http://hg.grml.org/grml-autoconfig/rev/fa92ef1d5c3e
Feel free to flame me now ;-)
Nothing to flame, brilliant feedback. :) Thanks!
regards, -mika-