[Shift2] Ideas

[n_K]

So I think it'd be good to have a thread to share ideas and things we could do with shift2!

Maybe have a discussion on them for possible inclusion?

Anyway here's some ideas I had;

-> Have a built-in (optional) script to compress /usr to a squashfs file (an arch linux user posted a script to do this on their forums... It saves quite a bit of space and speeds up /usr quite a bit, downsides are it takes a while to compress, if you add/remove/update a lot of packages you will need to resquash it to benefit)

-> Have an option/setting of how to compile all/some/listed(and be able to modify the list) packages, i.e. download compiled packages from the repos (arch style) or compile all using PKGBUILDs (gentoo style) or a mix of both.

-> Fix up arch's PKGBUILD system, don't get me wrong it's great but I'm sick of having to modify every damn package from 'make' to 'make -j 5', why the hell does it not use the make options from make.conf!?

-> Fix up gnome so that the keyboard volume buttons increase/decrease the volume less per step (ironically a very well used feature in gnome 2 that they removed from gnome 3, and there's PAGES on loads of sites of complaints about bringing it back and the volume control being useless because it's either too loud or too quiet, never right). [i've actually done this already but want people's opinions on this, maybe have a setting put back in gconf to control the stepping? (we can look at the gnome 2 source for how to do that) or ideas on what the default stepping should be, gnome 3 has 6 and I compiled mine as 3].

-> Have more package sets, i.e. there is gnome and gnome-extras on arch, but what about more say 'development' and have a selection of things like text editors, etc.?

-> Remove all useless locales automatically (I've no bloody idea why they keep getting put back/generated on arch as it is! Every time I update packages, my /usr/share/locale seems full of crap despite my /etc/locale.gen only having en_GB... So I made a quick-and-dirty bash script to remove all the rubbish) and possibly man pages too (Now I don't mean run this for EVERYONE AUTOMATICALLY, I mean, give the user a choice if they'd like it to run or not)

So, there's some of the ideas I remember :p.

[n_K]

Also for the GUI installer, a save/load settings function, so users can export and import things like what desktop enviroment to have (I think there should also be an option to have no GUI at all too) so for example, people can customise their desired install using the GUI, export it to a list and if they run the setup again on another PC just import a file instead of going through all the settings again (a bit like windows unattended for instance)

[Asharae]

Some of those are actually pretty good ideas, especially for me the volume step fixing and locale removal.

I suppose you could have it in the installer with a box saying "Remove un-needed locales", which would then run your script?