On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 09:09:32PM +0530, Moinak Ghosh wrote: > [ some snipped ] > > > What are the essential additions/ differences from the > > Nov release ? > > The primary feature is a Hard Disk installer (hdinstaller) > utility. This is not yet a GUI. It is a Perl-Curses based > utility that can also be navigated using the mouse if you > are running the Xfce desktop.
This is nice. At this point of development of a dot something release candidate, no point going any further than any scripted install ... you guys obviously would have your minds on the core sections. These 'gui niceties' can wait. > > Apart from that there are numerous customisations to reduce > bootup time. The most significant reductions happen when you > have 512MB RAM or a little more. > Yeah, this is an important issue. The problem is not of 'more the merrier', but of 'how little will do'. The version 0.2 needed a min of 256 mb, can the new one be pushed to work in older boxes (with say 128 mb of RAM) ? > I have also disabled the insecure services like ftpd, > telnetd etc. and most of the RPC services. This seems a sensible move. I really do not know, but how many people really permit access through telnetd ? It has been sshd for me for years. Is telnetd that essential ? For a live distro, I don't think telnetd, or for that matter even ftp daemon is of much use. Just my POV ... However RPC, I thought was one of specialised things, also used by Solaris for handy network programming and sharing of resources. Would this functionality be affected once Belenix is installed on a hard disk in a networked environment ? And would the RFC 1057 and 1831 compliance be retained ? > > BTW my current effort is directed at enhancing the loopback > block device module called lofi that makes a file behave > like a block device. So that for example you can create a > filesystem in a file. > This sure is a handy thing ... mounting files as a loop device would surely be a required step ... > I am adding on-the-fly decompression support to lofi so that > it can provide random access to a specially formatted > compressed file. This will allow me to compress the contents > of the CD to reduce access time and pack in more than 1.5 GB > of stuff in a 700MB CD. I have already tested the prototype > approach in userland and now implementing it in the lofi > kernel module. ... and specially so for reasons stated above. The Compressed Loop (cloop) kind of system is needed. This would be very important once you want to hyper-pack Belenix with apps. At the rate you guys are progessing, it seems there would be a zero dot version almost every four weeks, till some sort of v-1 comes out. Nice to see the rapid progess ... Best wishes, Bish
