Possible ideas for MOL

[Allan Fields]

Hi,

Since my MOL is very stable for me now, I can share some ideas I had for the 
future.  Maybe if I have the time I could help commit some of them.  Samuel, 
I'm sure you've thought of most of these already, plus most are really just 
icing type features.  MOL is amazing enough as it is, don't feel pressure to 
act on any of these.

Is it possible to allow MOL to window Mac OS windows over the X Window 
desktop and maybe even set the root to the Mac Desktop.  Or instead of the 
Mac desktop on the X root, since some desktops such as KDE and GNOME use this 
space already -- perhaps keep the desktop window opened at the same time and 
do sort of like this: you would be dragging a window inside the (smaller) Mac 
desktop but then as you brought it to the edge of the MOL window, it would 
resist for a second then snap out onto the full X desktop as another window 
in the MOL class.

Seems like MOL, could rival Mac OS X in ease of use of the classic 
environment.

I like the idea of the session saving.  This would be very nice.  I still 
don't understand why all operating systems don't have proper session 
management and persistence.

Is there any way to make Reboot actually hook into a mol routine and restart 
mol on the Linux side?  Then also it might be possible to make Sleep perform 
a power management routine under Linux (although I have no need for that 
myself).  Shutdown should always shutdown the Mac emulator only though, IMO.

One idea is a small INIT that would alter the special menu and supply: 
"Restart" (Restarts MOL), "Shutdown" (Stops MOL), Separator, "Reboot" (Stops 
MOL, issues reboot), "Halt" (Stops MOL, issues shutdown -h now), "Power off" 
(Stops MOL, issues shutdown -p now).  Each could hook into a handler routine 
which might have a time value to wait instead of 'now'.  But maybe this is an 
entirely dumb thing to do since, it's easy enough to quit MOL and then type: 
'shutdown'.   :)  Can MOL install a signal handler that would make it safer 
to kill, or does it matter?  I don't see the harm in crashing Mac OS since 
it's happened numerous times already to me in the past.  Sometimes it will do 
a disk check.

I tried making a script such as I mentioned previously, it's kind of a lot of 
work to make all those steps happen from the Mac side, thus not worth the 
effort.  Plus I haven't found it easy to mangle the Virtual Memory settings, 
even though newer versions of Mac OS 9 should support that from AppleScript 
according to Apple's website.  AppleScript support should be in all system 
components at least, otherwise, what's the point.

Allan