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2008 Google Summer of Code Highlights
andrewmin writes "SoC 2008 has begun, and with 175 organizations and 1125 students it looks better than ever before. Here's a quick run-down of a few programs that, if they are finished, will definitely be making their way onto your machine."
Adding a GUI to the upcoming GRUB 2 because its black and white terminal interface is scary? Doesn't GRUB already have a GUI? That pretty blue screen at bootup?
Nope. I see nothing there that will be on my machine in the foreseeable future.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Until grub2 has a security module so that i can lock down what you can boot too, im happy with grub, even if grub2 looks nice.
Hell i have 1 second time-out & hidden menu so i never see it anyway, grub doesn't need any nice interface as it shouldn't need to be seen other than when you have a problem in which case a nice UI just adds another thing to go wrong.
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Personally, I would prefer it if somebody would get GRUB 2 "production ready" first, instead of making fancy GUI menus for it.
Maybe it's just me, but I'd really like the ability to boot from LVM and get proper EFI support (though not really an issue until EFI is in wide distribution for x86) without having to install an experimental package.
It's a bootloader, guys. Functional first, form later.
1. Why the hell has it taken this long to get a Voice Recognition front end implemented?
2. Who decided that tomboy notes is a worthy front end?!?! Who uses tomboy notes? Couldn't we have something that would allow us to use speech to text in a way which is useful?
I imagine support for all closed, legacy formats is a pretty low priority. Why prioritize reverse engineering and optimizing less used features of an intentionally obfuscated format championed by someone trying to prevent the type of interoperability that is Pidgin's goal? Isn't it better for them to optimize file transfer over XMMP or the video and voice capabilities? I mean, if you want to transfer files with other users, there are plenty of other protocols that do work and where the Pidgin team doesn't have to work so hard only to have it intentionally broken by Microsoft at a later date. It is an inefficient use of their resources compared to working on core features using open protocols where they don't have to put in all that extra effort to overcome MS's antics.
A nice UI may be more important for a Live CD install/rescue disk, for instance, where there are many choices, and you want it to simple to use and self-explanatory for any user booting the disk. Also, GRUB 2 uses dynamically loadable modules for virtually everything, so you can just not load the future 'gfxmenu' module if you like. Then it will consume no memory and will not be a possible source of problems.
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I can't speak for Google on this, but I will say there is no bad about it. It is the job of the project to apply and coordinate all the happenings. I don't know if ReactOS even applied? If you are fond of ReactOS, I encourage you get involved, to contact the developers and to offer your time to apply for the SoC ... (I don't know if they did or not, just saying) ... Open Source really "works" when you actually get involved.
you can't have everything, where would you put it?
Thank you for pointing this out. TFA is fluff, and doesn't cover the real OS projects SoC really focuses on. The only things TFA lists that may affect me are the grub improvements, and maybe some of the file converters.
But, DFBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, GNU/Hurd, etc., all have SoC projects that go towards making the OS better. A good example would be the new tmpfs for NetBSD, which has now been ported to FreeBSD.