To whom it may concern:

My name is Doug Smith. I just want to let you know that I am really enjoying my new grml system. However, I have a few quick questions I need to ask you so that I can still get more out of it.

First of all, I wish to thank you for including speech output in the system. This is the only way I have of using computers at all. I am blind, and, of course, a monitor will do me no good at all. You solved that one for me. I would also like to thank you for including brltty in here as well. This is very good for people who like to use computers by means of a braille monitor.

This is the message I meant to send out last night, but, wow, I found myself trapped inside the editor with no way out. I discovered, much to my surprise, that the environment variable EDITOR is set to vim which is fine with me, except for the small problem I have of not knowing how to use vim. How, when using vim with mutt, the mail client I use, do you get into the menu which allows you to send the message. I wrote the last night's message with nano, which I can use, then tried to send it out and found myself trapped inside vim with no way to get back into mutt.

Well, now that you know why you received a blank message last evening, let me continue. The next question concerns the install I did, with grml2hd, on a usb hard drive. When I did the install, I made the initrd as instructed. Now, there was something in a previous message about which file in the initrd needs to be edited to make the usb boot work as it should. Which file is that, and what needs to be changed. I have never done this before.

Now, the third and final question I have has to do with the compression technology used to make the compressed GRML file. How does that work? How can so much data be put onto the cd and, then, the system know which parts to decompress to get the programs you want to use? This leads me to a new idea.

Is it possible to make a new way to install software into the system? The way it would work is this: Just put the system onto the hard drive with grml tohd. Now, we need to boot with grml fromhd and we can get started. Ok, let's select a piece of software to install, for this example, the missing binary codecs for mplayer. Can this somehow be done?

Why can't the image file on the hard drive have the relevant parts decompressed, just as in memory, written back to the drive, the new files introduced into these directories, then the compressed image file re-made just as it was before, except with the new files.

Is this possible, using the same decompression scenario as is used with the decompression of needed programs in memory for use?

Well, that's about it for now. I hope to get this one out with no problems. I appollogize for the messiness of this letter. Until I can use mutt with vim, I have to use the emulated mailx composition mode and try to press returnin the proper positions before running off the lines and losing data.

Once more thank you for such a wonderful system. I am more than glad to have it. I just want to learn more about it to be able to use it better.

Thank you.

Doug Smith