Ideas (by Paulo Correa Silva)

[Filip Navara]

As Paulo has problems sending messages to the list, I'm posting his list 
of ideas here myself. So here is the link:
http://www15.brinkster.com/nitrofurano/reactos/

- Filip

[jh]

On 2/22/04 at 1:47 AM Filip Navara wrote:

>  As Paulo has problems sending messages to the list,
> I'm posting his list 
> of ideas here myself. So here is the link:
> http://www15.brinkster.com/nitrofurano/reactos/
>
> - Filip
>  
Bootscreens:
		I think that political scenes should be avoided, may I suggest a picture of a supernova
or some such scene, or sun, or even a panoramic cloud scene (not like ms windows), with
only the name ReactOS in lower or the upper part of the screen.

Regards
jh

[[handytone24.de] Markus Nicoleit]

Hi !

I've downloaded ros to install it on a
p2 350 mhz, 64 mb ram, 6 gb hdd machine, but it every time hangs it self up
in the setup (sometimes i could copy all files, some times it crashed while
copying all files)
Latest it hangs itself up @ "flushing cache"

thx 4 help

PS Sorry abaut *g* mei (my) bad english

[Ge van Geldorp]

>   From: Markus Nicoleit
>  
>  I've downloaded ros to install it on a
>  p2 350 mhz, 64 mb ram, 6 gb hdd machine, but it every time 
>  hangs it self up in the setup (sometimes i could copy all 
>  files, some times it crashed while copying all files) Latest 
>  it hangs itself up @ "flushing cache" 
Just have a little bit more patience. "flushing cache" can take a long
time...

Ge van Geldorp.

[[handytone24.de] Markus Nicoleit]

but when flushing cache is running the computer does nothing more (ok the
cursor is blinking and the hdd light is on) but it do nothing. I let the
computer run for 5 hours. And nothing happend..

markus

-----Ursprungliche Nachricht-----
Von: ros-general-bounces(a)reactos.com
[mailto:[e-mail]]Im Auftrag von Ge van Geldorp
Gesendet: Sonntag, 22. Februar 2004 12:06
An: ros-general(a)reactos.com
Betreff: RE: [ros-general] Installing Problems


>   From: Markus Nicoleit
>
>  I've downloaded ros to install it on a
>  p2 350 mhz, 64 mb ram, 6 gb hdd machine, but it every time
>  hangs it self up in the setup (sometimes i could copy all
>  files, some times it crashed while copying all files) Latest
>  it hangs itself up @ "flushing cache" 
Just have a little bit more patience. "flushing cache" can take a long
time...

Ge van Geldorp.

_______________________________________________
ros-general mailing list
ros-general(a)reactos.com
http://reactos.com/mailman/listinfo/ros-general

[Ge van Geldorp]

>   From: Markus Nicoleit
>  
>  but when flushing cache is running the computer does nothing 
>  more (ok the cursor is blinking and the hdd light is on) but 
>  it do nothing. I let the computer run for 5 hours. And 
>  nothing happend.. 
Hmmm, 5 hours should be enough.... Sorry, no idea then.

Ge van Geldorp.

[[handytone24.de] Markus Nicoleit]

and i think 350 mhz should be also enough... could it be that something be
wrong with my mbr? becuase i could NOT format my disk with rossetup (hangs
itself up, like flushing cache).,....

-----Ursprungliche Nachricht-----
Von: ros-general-bounces(a)reactos.com
[mailto:[e-mail]]Im Auftrag von Ge van Geldorp
Gesendet: Sonntag, 22. Februar 2004 12:22
An: ros-general(a)reactos.com
Betreff: RE: [ros-general] Installing Problems


>   From: Markus Nicoleit
>
>  but when flushing cache is running the computer does nothing
>  more (ok the cursor is blinking and the hdd light is on) but
>  it do nothing. I let the computer run for 5 hours. And
>  nothing happend.. 
Hmmm, 5 hours should be enough.... Sorry, no idea then.

Ge van Geldorp.

_______________________________________________
ros-general mailing list
ros-general(a)reactos.com
http://reactos.com/mailman/listinfo/ros-general

[KJK::Hyperion]

At 01.47 22/02/2004, you wrote:
>  • Indian keymaps: 
[...]

from what I've heard, Indian support is going to be a bitch. Unicode 
support for Indian is badly designed - or so I'm told - and not able to 
represent all Indian text. Operating systems where file names are binary 
strings (like most POSIX systems) aren't going to be affected by this. We, 
being Windows, will receive the equivalent of a full frontal impact with a 
semi truck. Either we'll make liberal use of the user-defined Unicode range 
(hoping not to tread over other uses of this range - Microsoft Interix, 
IIRC, uses characters in this range to represent characters that would be 
otherwise illegal in file names on Windows, like ":") or we'll be left
behind

>  • Startup Screens:
> Is an idea i have about contributing and voting for different illustrated 
> boot screens (640x480 4bitdepth (16 colours)) on each version of ReactOS, 
> from anyone wanted to contribute. 
Microsoft did, IMHO, the right thing in Windows XP: no boot screen. Just a 
progress bar and a logo. No cheesy new-age splash screen like in Windows 
98, no phony boot GUI like in Windows 2000. Just a logo in basic colors on 
a solid black backdrop. I'll add that we should consider freeing our kernel 
of legacy support - the assumption that all x86 machines have a display, 
and a VGA one at it, has to go. Boot screens sure are pretty, but they 
don't justify dedicated kernel support

>  My idea for ROS boot screens were about illustrations,
> drawings, 
> paintings, photos and whatever (a bit like used on Gimp and Sodipodi), 
> which theme would mainly focus on the ReactOS idea 
hrrrm. Your samples look very... dubious. I don't want ReactOS to be 
associated with blatant political propaganda art. Can't you find something 
a bit more neutral?

>  • VGA and SVGA drivers: 
[...]
>  - Gamma adjust:
> Would affect the pallete on up-to-8bitdepth screenmodes (like 640x480 4bit 
> - generic vga) 
Pass

>  - Grayscale mode:
> Would be great having it available, specially on generic vga mode, like 
> provided by default from BeOS and NextSTEP. - this would be nice on 
> getting working the opentype driver smoothness over a low bitdepth 
> screenmode as generic vga is. 
Can do. Not sure if the control panel will be able to tell the difference 
between grayscale and other paletted modes, though

>  - Display rotation (90degree step) and flipping:
> I have not here the needed alghorithms, but it seems to be not that hard - 
> this would also work on generic vga mode - talking from me, beign possible 
> to use display in a vertical position has a vital importance. 
Not sure if any drivers can be natively configured for this. If they can't, 
you'll only be able to implement it on bare framebuffers (no acceleration 
nor hardware-specific optimizations) and with a pretty big deal of 
resources. This is something better postponed to when there's a real need

>  - Virtual screen mode:
> This would be very useful on, when we have just a 4x3 monitor, getting for 
> example, a 1280x960 resolution from a 5x4 resolution like 1280x1024, 
> avoiding so pixel ratio distortions or border vertical bars. 
Same as above. If the driver doesn't support the resolution, 
double-buffering with a filter driver is the only way, and it turns your 
display into a cow - slow and eats a lot

>  • Drive letter assignments: 
[...]
>  My idea is you can assign any kind of string
> (unconflictable like A-to-Z 
> simplicity) before colon, just like ArOS and AmigaOS does 
and don't forget VMS. That drive letters in Windows NT are virtual aliases 
comes directly with the VMS heritage

>  if this can work easily on FreeDOS, i think surely
> would work on ReactOS 
> (as well any kind of operative system compatible with DOS and w32 
> depending of the wish of making it possible). 
Doable (I'd go as far as mounting removable volumes under their label, so 
you could e.g. insert a CD-ROM in any drive, instead of the first one you 
inserted it into), but programs will complain. Drive letters need to stay 
for some time, altough they can surely stay hidden for the time being. And 
using a single colon conflicts with the syntax for streams, but you'd 
probably usually put a backslash right after the colon, so that could be 
used to disambiguate

>  • Generic inkjet printer drivers:
> Since all seems to work in the same way (maybe those prehistoric ribbon 
> printers also does), the idea would be using just one driver for whatever 
> printer you may have connected to your computer (which could be parallel, 
> serial or usb), getting these specs from a kind of plugin document you 
> also can choose when printing (well, i don't know if GimpPrint works in 
> the same way...) 
Done! Sometimes Microsoft is painfully good at designing software. Printer 
drivers have *always* worked like this, in the Windows NT family. There's 
three master printer drivers (plotter, Postscript and universal), and 
virtually all drivers are plug-ins and/or data files for one of them 
(altough you can still write your own driver - even as a kernel-mode 
display driver!). Even the configuration UI is unified between the three - 
unusual even for Microsoft, but a welcome plus. All of this is widely 
documented

>  • Fonts:
> Possibility of installing svg fonts as well you can the ttf ones - it 
> seems to be related to be freetype.dll issue or something like - the goal 
> of svg is you beign able to install fonts which you can edit these 
> beziers, hinting and kerning pairs as simply as using a txt editor, since 
> svg is a mere xml-based txt format. 
The mention of XML worries me. If this will ever be supported by ReactOS, 
it will likely run on a non-validating engine, which may not be what the 
author of the font intended but is the only way to parse XML sanely in 
kernel mode (to the naysayers: XML adds no overhead, as it's only used in 
the very first pass. We don't need the bloat of DOM for this, a tokenizer 
like SAX will be more than adequate)

>  • Tape Backup drivers: 
[...]

Not a goal for ReactOS

[robert K.]

KJK::Hyperion wrote:
>   At 01.47 22/02/2004, you wrote:
>  
> >   • Indian keymaps: 
>  
>  [...]
>  
>  from what I've heard, Indian support is going to be a bitch. Unicode 
>  support for Indian is badly designed - or so I'm told - and not able to 
>  represent all Indian text. Operating systems where file names are binary 
>  strings (like most POSIX systems) aren't going to be affected by this. 
>  We, being Windows, will receive the equivalent of a full frontal impact 
>  with a semi truck. Either we'll make liberal use of the user-defined 
>  Unicode range (hoping not to tread over other uses of this range - 
>  Microsoft Interix, IIRC, uses characters in this range to represent 
>  characters that would be otherwise illegal in file names on Windows, 
>  like ":") or we'll be left behind 
Explain me more about indian. Which charset is affected?  Hindi, 
Devangali, unknown?
I know there're some scripts in the world which are context sensitive. 
AFAIK they have one code point for each letter variation. So this should 
be 'just' a problem of correct input mehtod editors....

What you tell us is that several code points are missing :-?
AFAIK UCS-2 / BMP (basic multilingual plane) is rather compleete. There 
are however very rare or died out scripts missing like Keilscript.

So what's exactlY?

[Jan Tisje]

Filip Navara <xnavara(a)volny.cz> schrieb am Sun, 22 Feb 2004 01:47:19 +0100

>   As Paulo has problems sending messages to the list,
> I'm posting his list 
>  of ideas here myself. So here is the link:
>  http://www15.brinkster.com/nitrofurano/reactos/ 
in general there are some great ideas. 
I want to show my opinion...

NGoro
http://www15.brinkster.com/nitrofurano/ngoro/

So, what is the difference to cygwin? 
No emulation layer -> much faster? 

Does "speed only" allow such an effort? 

btw, do you plan to "include" cygwin?

MBulu
http://www15.brinkster.com/nitrofurano/mbulu/

>   Maybe all of us got wondered with some hardware
> performace and quality,
>  and got pissed out with its driver quality, [...]
>  As well, manufacturers usually lacks deeply on support (except very
>  rare cases), they usually don't listen us, or doesn't know how to do it. 
yeah. I agree. 

>   If someone has doubts about the usability of a project
> like this, here
>  are some questions about:
>  - is every video driver supporting gamma adjust, rotation (90 degrees)
>  and virtual screen modes (like 1280x960 (4x3) from the so weird
>  1280x1024 (5x4)), as well inserting and removing desired screen modes
>  from/to a choosable list (a claim to a comfortable usage about
>  resolution choice)?
>  - is every inkjet printer driver supporting custom halftone patterns
>  and postscript output, paging and overlapping (like an A0 drawing into
>  several A4 sheets) features?
>  - is not so annoying some fancies (which ones some manufacturer's
>  drivers insist to put into) only are useful to get your operative
>  system unstable, as well with a disastrous interface? 
I mostly agree, but how do you plan to do that? 
the problem is, that every manufacturere thinks he has to implement such
features again and again. 
This always sucks. 
All this should be provided by OS, or by 3rd-party-software, like fineprint
does. NOT by drivers. 
If you would try to implement it per driver, then you would be forced to
write drivers for every hardware available only to add the standard lib
that does these meta jobs. 

btw, you probably could start with a link to the free bt8x8 driver 
(don't have the link now)


Chibema (GUI) 
well, it is very important, too. but I do not have anything to say now

Great ideas paulo, i would like to hear even more :-)


Jan

[Jan Tisje]

Hi. 

>   Drive Letter Assignments 
very important, in my opinion!
is anything implemented yet? 
I believe it is not. Who wants to think about it? 

>   System Sounds
>  Would be not bad idea supporting .mp3 and ogg-vorbis formats for this
>  as well .wav (maybe also .mod-like formats).  
do not make the mistake trying to support EVERYTHING. 
just provide plug-in interfaces. (that are better, and more easy to use
than MS ones)
I don't want to execute 20 different installers until i got my audio and
video codecs installed. 

>   ROS-Apps:
>  - Post-its (or Stickies, from MacOS-Classic) 
what about http://www.klebezettel.net/
?         


Jan