[CS-FSLUG] Need input

[Ed Hurst]

                           Refining the Quest


In my computer ministry I often run into a lot of older boxes still
running quite well. They lack the processor or RAM to run a full-blown
modern Linux distro, or even a BSD, if we expect to run recent releases
of either X server. For the die-hard, there's Deli Linux[1] and that's
one way of doing things. Use an older kernel series, but fully updated
for security; use the older version of X, slightly enhanced; use all
the lightest possible applications: Siag Office, Dillo, Sylpheed, etc.
That's a pretty good answer for some uses, and I plan to watch it
closely, and test it on some of those older machines.

Even without a basic hostility to X altogether, there are valid reasons
for avoiding it. In the first place, X is a server, primarily designed
to serve the GUI out to other machines. On the stand-alone desktop,
that's a lot of code not being used. There's an awful lot of Linux
machines out there being used that way. There's also quite a few
not-so-old machines that really struggle to run modern distros of
Linux, with lots of modern hardware options unsupported by the likes of
Deli Linux.

Having continued my research on the console vs. light GUI quest, I've
concluded there's precious little hope for the latter. There are a
couple of bona fide light GUI projects: DirectFB[2] and KGI[3], along
with a few others. While both are available for Linux and FreeBSD, the
I'm guessing DirectFB has a brighther future with Linux, and KGI with
BSD. Both projects seem far down the road from producing a stable
product, plus I'm not yet sure from reading the documentation whether
current X-based apps will easily port to either. For now, the console
is the place I'll focus.

Right from the start, when I began using Linux 8 years ago, I recall
reading in various user forums how Linux had completely lost out on the
development of a console word processor. Now, by definintion, a word
processor hides the formatting code from the user, and substitutes
various indicators of what the formatting looks like. On the console,
spacing and alignment isn't too hard to display, but character
formatting is usually indicated by color. In the minds of most users,
character-based word processing is connected to character mode
printing. Thus, for an American, that means a page of text is about 54
lines, and either 65 columns (10pt), 78 columns (12pt), or 98 columns
(15pt). Those were the standard font options built into most printers
back when this sort of word processing dominated the computer scene.

Unless printer drivers are written for each printer, in the fashion of
Word Perfect 5.x and 6.x, there's not that many options for character
mode printing that includes the few basic text enhancements built into
most printers with their internal fonts. There is a frame work for it
with nroff and troff, but those are markup languages. As far as I know,
only the Andrew Project ("EZ") from Carnegie-Melon tried anything with
that, and their suite was GUI. To use groff guarantees processing the
output into graphical mode, and ghostscript/CUPS has that covered.
Frankly, I prefer dot-matrix printers and character mode printing.
Further, there's an awful lot of folks out there still using that sort
of hardware. It's not glamorous, it's anything but cutting edge, and
thus draws almost no attention from developers.

That's the part I wish I could fix. Where's the handle? How do I grab
this? I reiterate that a very major part of my concern is making
Linux/Unix available for the Christians in the Third World. That won't
interest too many Open Source developers, whose numbers seem dominated
by non-believers. So I'm back to asking for comments and prayer. What
do you think?

    [1] <URL: http://delilinux.berlios.de/>
    [2] <URL: http://www.directfb.org/>
    [3] <URL: http://kgi-wip.sourceforge.net/>
    [4] <URL: http://ed.asisaid.com/blog/index.php?p=203>


Ed Hurst
-----------
A Bible Site -- http://webs.tconline.net/softedges/
Linux & Unix Help -- http://ed.asisaid.com/
Blog -- http://ed.asisaid.com/blog/