Hi Brenton,
why your opinion should not be worth much? - I just want to start discussion, that we know, in which direction we are going. When we know, what we want, its more easy to integrate new developers like Arun and Kapil and I think there are also others.
My general aim is to get a stabil 5.0 with the minimal effort - it should also include a Raspberry Pi version. I think the future for SilTaz is in the professional market in the third world - like described here:
http://forum.slitaz.org/topic/we-are-taking-slitaz-to-kenya
To get money for future developement, I think, its only possible through big international organisations. But to start this we ne a stable multi-user proved release. And when we get this - then it will be time
work on sophisticated solutions.
2) There is the free unrar package in cooking and p7zip is also able to unpack rar files - The main features of 7-Zip
High compression ratio in 7z format with LZMA and LZMA2 compression
Supported formats:
Packing / unpacking: 7z, XZ, BZIP2, GZIP, TAR, ZIP and WIM
Unpacking only: ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, CramFS, DEB, DMG, FAT, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MBR, MSI, NSIS, NTFS, RAR, RPM, SquashFS, UDF, VHD, WIM, XAR and Z. So no need for unfree rar package
And regarding the plugdev group - its necessary in professional multiuser environment - the normal user will not notice anything about this. This souluton is based on standard *nix access management.
The relevant devices are owned by a dedicated group or groups (like plugdev, usb, video…) and therefore can only be used by users belonging to those groups. and the good new - in rolling there exists now the plugdev groop, so its easy...
4) why does cpu freq scaling spawn weird errors on systems that does not support it?
This is the error on an intel Atom system (Erics), that does not support it - just print this lines to log - nothing else is happening - its tested on my old geode, celeron systems
modprobe: ERROR: could not insert 'acpi_cpufreq': Input/output error
modprobe: ERROR: could not insert 'powernow_k6': No such device
modprobe: ERROR: could not insert 'powernow_k7': No such device
modprobe: ERROR: could not insert 'powernow_k8': No such device
modprobe: ERROR: could not insert 'speedstep_smi': No such device
modprobe: ERROR: could not insert 'speedstep_ich': No such device
modprobe: ERROR: could not insert 'gx_suspmod': No such device
modprobe: ERROR: could not insert 'longrun': No such device
modprobe: ERROR: could not insert 'longhaul': No such device
modprobe: ERROR: could not insert 'cpufreq_nforce2': No such device
modprobe: ERROR: could not insert 'e_powersaver': No such device
Error setting new values. Common errors:
- Do you have proper administration rights? (super-user?)
- Is the governor you requested available and modprobed?
- Trying to set an invalid policy?
- Trying to set a specific frequency, but userspace governor is not available, for example because of hardware which cannot be set to a specific frequency or because the userspace governor isn't loaded?
And the argument that power plants always produce the same amount of power constantly is just stupid - evry Watt counts, especially with the new Gas Power plants, who can extremly quick react on the demand of
electricity - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaking_power_plant - and if we ar targeting to undeveloped regiones, its 100 times more important.
and now on the end 1)
rethinking the idea of an special intel iso, I think we we should do a so called user friendly iso with most of the video drivers, cups, connman, ofono and usbmodswitch
Thomas