[Grml] Suggestions

[Michael Prokop]

* Michael Schierl <schierlm-public at 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:

> 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.

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

> 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.)

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).

> 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...?

Interesting idea. I'll add it to the todolist and will discuss it
with other developers.

> 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 :-)

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-
-- 
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