Possible ideas for MOL

[mol-general@lists.maconlinux.org]

On Fri, Aug 23, 2002 at 05:46:02PM -0400, Allan Fields wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 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.

I have experimented a bit with running MOL as the X-root.

> 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.

The functionality is already in MOL, although disabled. I believe it is a 
very nice feature. I'm also thinking about a mol launcher. I.e. a small
app that automatically resumes MOL whenever a mol dedicated VT is activated
and (possibly) suspends MOL when the VT is closed. Thus MacOS would virtually
always be running...

> Is there any way to make Reboot actually hook into a mol routine and restart 
> mol on the Linux side?  

Yes, that should be possible.

> Then also it might be possible to make Sleep perform 
> a power management routine under Linux (although I have no need for that 
> myself). 

MOL should probably suspend when sleep mode is entered. I don't think it
is appropriate to put Linux to sleep though.

> 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.

Well, one should always shutdown normally. The risk of disk corruption
is not that great though, probably because of the non-aggressive caching
of MacOS.

But it certainly would be useful to be able to issue mol commands
like "shutdown MacOS" or "switch to MacOS fullscreen" from the commandline
or indirectly through a signal. It should be rather simple to achieve
this.

> 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.  

This should be done from a fake device driver. The driver can perform
task-level stuff through Notification Manager routines.

> 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.  

It is possible to prohibit the usage of virtual memory by setting i flag
in the device driver. (This flag is used for instance to prevent
removable devices to be used from VM storage).

> AppleScript support should be in all system 
> components at least, otherwise, what's the point.

AppleScript is evil :-). I believe one can do these things using
AppleEvents from C.

Cheers,

/Samuel