a) we're already discussing urpmi and nvidia future
b) we can haggle over these ideas while the MDK staff takes a well deserved mini-holiday
Here's my own personal 9.1 wishlist. Some topics I'm planning on working on, some are already underway by MDK staff, others are open to volunteers/naysayers.
1. Spiffy new sounddrake.
If I knew perl, I'd do it myself, but alas...
I'd like to see a more intuitive setup. What card is detected? What drivers do you want, alsa or oss? Do you want a sound daemon? Do you want an init.d for jack? Do you have a midi card? Do you have USB audio or USB midi? etc. etc.
2. Spiffy new fontdrake.
It's looking a bit dated; it's not all that easy to use; it would be cool to have more features. I'm sure someone can think of something to do to it.
3. Developer's web portal: todo list, interfaces with bugzilla, contact information, etc. TUTOS is a really cool system. If someone can hack php, I'm sure we could integrate it with bugzilla. Warly has said he will look into this.
4. Fix pygnome/pygnome2/pygtk/pygtk2 mess. I think Gotz is planning on doing this.
5. New menu entry for 'home and hobby' type applications. I've asked for this a few times... no response. There are a lot of apps that should go in this category. I think Joe user would look for a recipe application is 'home and hobby' rather than 'databases'. Similarily, putting gramps in 'sciences' is a bit of a stretch, and I have some 'homework' applications that don't really belong in 'office'.
6. Get video capture working well.
We have a few assorted video grab applications. Most suck. A lot of the new ones won't compile. This is really lacking. Are our video4linux headers still screwed up?
7. Get cinelerra into main.
All we have to do is a) remove MS TTF's and replce with some GPL fonts, b) remove lame mp3 encoder. The code is nasty, but any good C hacker should be able to do it in a day.
8. Integrate GATOS project. Thanks to Frederic and Spencer this is underway, but still rough.
9. Integrate Nautilus-burn more obviously. Destop icon, mini-tutorial, etc.
10. Autodetect best fonts.
I think this already works for the desktop. i.e. Does installing Arial automatically replace 'sans' on the desktop? I think so, but I'm not sure.
Same should happen for OpenOffice. If Times New Roman is installed, it should automatically replace Nimbus Ugly-Face in OO.o.
Also would be nice to integrate the new GPL fonts that are coming out in a similar manner.
11. Superchaged applications.
While I'm all for an rpm system and i586 optimization, there are a few applications that REALLY suck as they are. ATLAS, transcode, and mjpegtools come to mind. They are rediculously slow. Narfi has some benchmarks I think.
Some options are:
a) put athlon/P4/mmx rpms on club
b) put athlon/P4/mmx rpms in unsupported
c) someone write a script that will rebuild them locally with more optimization
d) someone write a script that will rebuild any srpm locally for local architecture
I've suggested (d) a few times to Deno and others and got quite rude responses. I think it might be a cool feature... definitely media worthy. You could install a stock distro, then rebuild anything resource-heavy (XFree, ATLAS, transcode) for your local architecture with no rpm or tarball knowledge. It's just an idea.
12. More automated lm_sensors installation.
Can we make this more automated? Like install the rpm, and it shows up in gkrellm. Right now, there are scripts to run, text files to edit, and init.d daemons that don't always work as expected.
That's my list.
As you can see, it's mostly nitpicky stuff, and UI stuff, which means 9.1 is going to be great, if there's so little to improve on!
Thanks guys, Austin
--
Austin Acton Hon.B.Sc.
Synthetic Organic Chemist, Teaching Assistant
Department of Chemistry, York University, Toronto
MandrakeClub Volunteer (www.mandrakeclub.com)
homepage: www.groundstate.ca