[Grml] Suggestions

[Michael Schierl]

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