Hi All,
Thanks for your help. I'm still processing your input.
They just changed my Yahoo! mail; let's hope you get this.
Elvis
PS
User space text-mode only virtual terminals
On Mon, Jun 14, 2004 at 21:38:13 +0200, Pablo Saratxaga wrote:
> [...] It would be perfectly ok to provide only very minimalistic kernel
support (even simpler and lighter than the current one) and have a user space
'vc' loaded early in the boot process.
Or none at all. Just move the VC mux out of the kernel and into user space:
======================================================================
--+ : +-------+ : +------+
...<-:->|console|<-----------------------------------------:->| |
--+ : +-------+ +---+ : |VC mux|
: +-------->|tcp|-----------------------:->| |
: | +---+ : +------+
: | :
: | +---+ : +-----+
: | +------>|tcp|<----------------------:->| |
: | | +---+ : |vterm|
: | | +---------------------:->| |
: | | | : +-----+
: | | | m+-----+s +----+ : +-----+
: | | +->|ptty0|<-->|tty0|<-:->|shell|
: | | +-----+ +----+ : +-----+
: | | :
: | | +---+ : +-----+
: | | +---->|tcp|<----------------------:->| |
: | | | +---+ : |vterm|
: | | | +---------------------:->| |
: | | | | : +-----+
: | | | | m+-----+s +----+ : +-----+
: | | | +->|ptty1|<-->|tty1|<-:->|login|
: | | | +-----+ +----+ : +-----+
: v v v :
: +------+ +---+ : +-----+
: ... -->|IP mux|<-->|tcp|<----------------------:->| |
: +------+ +---+ : |vterm|
: +---------------------:->| |
: | : +-----+
: | m+-----+s +----+ : +-----+
: +->|ptty2|<-->|tty2|<-:->|getty|
: +-----+ +----+ : +-----+
======================================================================
This is exactly the same situation which applies to xterms, only the VC mux
opens the console in character mode. It then forks a fixed number of 'vterms'
as child processes. Each vterm holds the character contents of its display as
well as the state of its keyboard.
Conclusion: vterms and xterms are redundant, so there is no good reason to run
them both at the same time. And xterms are more flexible.
Still, the keyboards are the same, so both could share the same, better(=X)
'keymaps' fsm.
512(=2**9) character glyphs in the vterm character buffer would be plenty for
my purposes: Latin (french, german, spanish, italian), Greek (mono- and
polytonic) and Cyrillic, but I'd have to be able to chose the unicode
characters I want, and map them to glyphs in the console-font.
(You couldn't pull the IP mux out as easily, relying on traditional Unix pipes
for IPC... that's another mailing list.)
> > Unicode [...] is prejudiced against non-speakers.
> ??? [...]
I meant to say "utf-8". The irony is that utf-8 also blew up the Latin-1
characters. Now everything (but English) is twice the size. (That's not true,
only the accented vowels are.)
The Perseus Project does a nice job with unicode, it has to, because there is
no national character set for poly Greek (well there is, sort of, the encoding
schemes used in academia, but they are less well known, and the unicode font
support is better).
> > Why do Greek newspapers still use ISO 8859-7?
> For the same reason that a majority of English language web sites still use
windows-1252, I suppose.
I guess we'll have to ask them.
> > it looks like these older character sets will be around for a long time.
> Yes, but not for that reason (to save space); they are around because there
is a lot of *OLD* data in those encodings [...]
http://www.dolnet.ta-nea.gr/ is still producing alot of new material, and their
mix is text-oriented.
I thought it might be because they were using web authoring tools based on the
older, national character set.
Wide characters are easily compressed, by the file system, or the network. In
fact, there is alot of network compression going on behind the scenes already.
My dial-up ISP in the US is offering "DSL speeds" for another $5.00/month. It's
all based on compression, and would work great on utf-8 (but not on the
graphics). The newspaper could (easily) compress all their archive/search
material, even at the application layer. (Generally I'm against application
layer data compression, because I can't unzip files at the library on public
Internet terminals, not to mention Linux compression. We use Windows NT
workstations.)
> > Is there a version of Linux which runs as a Microsoft Window (not cygwin)?
> ?? What you say doesn't make sense. (you can on the other hand run an
operating system inside of a virtual computer box inside another operating
system)
I should have asked, "Is there a version of Microsoft Windows which will run a
copy of Linux?" Microsoft describes Windows as a "virtual-machine" operating
system, and DOS does, indeed, run, as an operating system in a window. I assume
a VxD would map/share the PC hardware, controlled by Windows, to the device
drivers in the Linux kernel.
Oh yeah, I forgot, it's gotta be free :)
Did you know Microsoft has removed unicode support from their accessory
program, Wordpad, in Windows XP? That is the reason I'll be changing to Linux.
They want me to use Word 2000, a real dinosaur, to type unicode text, so I
haven't given up my Windows 98 machine, yet.
> > [...] I've never worked in Latin-1, or Latin-2, just ascii and unicode.
> I very much doubt you worked in "just ascii" (maybe in 1969 [...])
1969? I had a couple hit records that year.
Elvis
PS
I got started on an IBM 1170 in 1973. It was an ebcdic machine, but who
noticed. We punched our Fortran programs on cards (that would be a Hollerith
code).
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