John, a couple off the top of my head (and not necessarily something
that's already in the Gaps document now), other people suggested these
to me too, so I take no credit for them:
* Development Environment
o NetBeans
+ It seems that we in Sun are totally set on having
Netbeans as our main development platform - that being
the case , I would love to see a proper C/C++ editing
environment in Netbeans 5. This would include the use
of completion mechanisms (through pre-parsing of
headers, etc) similar to the way Java development
works - this isn't anything new and would be fantastic
to have. Eclipse has some of this, but it's still not
perfect, so there's opportunity there. And If we could
include Glade integration into this for developing a
UI we'd be a long way to having decent development
environment for GNOME on Solaris, and other C/C++
based projects... Also shouldn't forget debugger
(dbx/gdb) integration... This would make Netbeans into
an IDE to compete with Visual Studio...
+ If glade integration seems to difficult, how about
Matisse integration into GNOME...
* Security
o Encrypted Filesystems
+ There has been much fuss made about this recently on
Linux - with the ability to support encrypted
filesystems on removable devices. We have the
technology in OpenSolaris to do this, and Darren
Moffat has a page on it
(http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/security/projects/xlofi/),
so if we could get this integrated into the desktop
(e.g. authentication UI, etc) then we would be have
something of significant importantance.
+ A sub-project for this would be to look at PCFS (ie
FAT/FAT32 filesystems) and how MS Windows and Linux
are handling the encryption and making it work on
OpenSolaris so we support the heterogeneous
environment too.
o Firewall editor
+ On OpenSolaris, we have the hidden feature of a built
in firewall in the ipf kernel module and ipfilter
command. Let's being this to the forefront and produce
a UI for configuring it.
o Service reduction (could also be performance, depends on how
you look at it)
+ We have a lot of services running on Solaris (not
quite so many on OpenSolaris now) but it's certain
that many of these could be disabled by default and
still have a usable desktop - some investigation into
the creation of a desktop configuration for SMF would
be good and would help speed up boot time as well.
* Desktop Performance
o File Monitoring
+ In OpenSolaris, there is a kernel API called File
Event Mechanism. Unfortunately this still doesn't have
a userland API that could be used by applications or
libraries. Linux and AIX both have inotify to do this,
but OpenSolaris doesn't. This would be an interesting
project to get done and have libfam modified to
support OpenSolaris using this mechanism rather than
polling
Thanks,
Darren.
John Rice wrote:
> People,
>
> Jim Grisanzio has kicked this off as a general request for
> participation from all the OpenSolaris projects:
> http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=7878&tstart=0
>
> Anyone any desktop related ideas that would be suitable?
>
> Easy:
> Add Gnome Applet support as sample project in Netbeans - using Java
> Gnome bindings.
>
> Medium:
> Reduce memory consumption of Gtk+ hello world application.
>
> Hard:
> Modify Firefox's tabbing behaviour to allow it to run with reduced
> memory requirements, only hold images in memory for currently visible
> tab. Plenty of other optimisations that could be looked at to allow
> Firefox to run better ina memory constrained environment.
>
> Darren - I'm sure you have loads from the Linux gaps analysis and the
> System Tools project, so just fire ahead.
>
> Glynn - I assume the best thing here is for you to put up a Google
> Summer of Code page on the OpenSolaris Desktop home page, that Jim can
> point to.
>
> JR
