MOL future plans

[mol-general@lists.maconlinux.org]

On Fri, Apr 05, 2002 at 02:48:30PM -0700, Keary Suska wrote:
> on 4/5/02 1:01 PM, samuel@ibrium.se purportedly said:
> 
> > I'm open for suggestions though. What is the most
> > pressing issue?
> 
> 1) Docs, docs, docs. Right now, MOL is barely usable for me, but perhaps
> that is a configuration issue. But being that the docs are far less than
> adequate, I have no means of knowing. What's thew point of adding new
> features when it isn't even possible to know how to properly operate the
> existing ones?

The authoritative MOL documentation is currently the userguide at

	http://www.maconlinux.org/userguide/

It really should be bundled with mol in the future (this was my
intention from the beginning, but it just didn't happen). I 
don't quite like the format though. It's a be awkward 
both to read and to write. And, most importantly, it is not as 
extensive as it should be.

> Since I am not sure what these actually fall under, or if they are just
> configuration issues:
> 
> 2) Having a valid keyboard layout. It don't know what layout MOL is
> using--it is not the same as X, and certain keys, essential keys for stuff I
> do, are missing.

There is a section about key remappings in the userguide above; does 
it help? 

The main problem is that it is not so simple to figure out which physical
key corresponds to a particular X event. For instance, the X-server might 
configure the command key to be "Alt-L" but it could as well be "Meta-L" 
etc. 

One solution would be parsing X config files, but this is tricky.
As a crude (but effective) alternative one could write a small
program that asks the user to press each key once. Would this be 
good enough?

> 3) I can have video in X, but not in MOL. Just get a blank screen (I think
> it may work when launching MOL under X, but then the command key doesn't
> work so that's fairly useless). It works if I pass "novideo" to the kernel,
> but otherwise just blackness. Molvconfig is of no assistance. It appears to
> lock up. I am using the r128 driver (rage128 pro/AGP, sawtooth, Apple studio
> display)

If I read you correctly, mol in a X-window works (but full-screen video 
does not). I think a working workaround is switching the depth of the console
to 8-bit using fbset and then start molvconfig. (I would like to hear more
about any issues with molvconfig btw).

> 4) Solving the issue with OS 9.2.2 (pauses for a particularly long time on
> boot).

This is at the top of my list, as well as preventing the search algorithm
from trying to boot the MacOS X bootloader instead of MacOS 9.

/Samuel