Release Candidates :: DSL 2.0RC2!

One change I'd like to see is that the default font colors in bash changed depending on the background or style colors for all the apps that open in bash. Black fonts are a bit difficult to see against the dark fractal background when you are running something like parted, or other CLI based app.

d2d,

Eventually, the day will come where the majority of computers use SATA for their disk controllers. Just like IDE replaced older systems like MFM? , SATA is replacing IDE.

Right now it is not a big problem because almost all CDROM drives shipped today are still IDE/ATAPI so you can get DSL up and running and then afterwords install the SATA drivers as modules from the net or somewhere else.

However, eventually even CDROM drives will be mass converted over to SATA and you will be unable to even get DSL booted into the KNOPPIX filesystem without the SATA drivers already being activated. So in this case, a modules_cut approach will not work and you will need to either compile the driver directly into the kernel (like the existing compiled-in IDE driver), OR add the SATA drivers to the initial ramdisk (minirt24.gz) and load them as part of the linuxrc initial start script.

Fortunately, the hardware industry is moving towards a standard SATA controller interface which should simplify and future-proof the driver process just like the industry standard IDE controller interface did.

Even so, the guys who wrote the Linux SATA drivers did a great job because they rolled all of the common SATA controller code into a shared library file called "libata". This means that most of the driver modules that I listed earlier in this thread are relatively small in size due to shared libata code.

So while a satadivers.dsl type system will work in the short term, longer term in order to maintain bootability, I expect that the drivers will need to be incorporated into the base ISO kernel or miniroot.

doobit: As far as I know, that is an issue with individual mydsl applications that were made before the switch to aterm and not yet fixed. If a menu item or icon starts "rxvt -e command", it will likely use black text. One way to fix this for now is to duplicate the "aterm" lines in /home/dsl/.Xdefaults, changing "aterm" to "rxvt" in the copied lines.
It wouldn't hurt to do the same for "xterm" as well.

Thanks mikshaw!

Quote (cbagger01 @ Nov. 16 2005,12:51)

So in this case, a modules_cut approach will not work and you will need to either compile the driver directly into the kernel (like the existing compiled-in IDE driver), OR add the SATA drivers to the initial ramdisk (minirt24.gz) and load them as part of the linuxrc initial start script.

I think the last aproach (sata-driver as a module) will be the best, especially when booting from USB-stick, because both the USB-stick and the SATA-drives will be emulated as SCSI-drives, but which will be the first (sda) and which next?
In the module-aproach you can make sure that the USB-stick will be (and stay) sda, and sata-drives sdb etc.

Next Page...
original here.