On Thu, 19 May 2016, Stephanie Daugherty wrote:
> On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 8:13 PM Joel Roth <[1]joelz@???> wrote:
> 1) CAPSLOCK key under console and X, should be mapped to Control
>
> Capslock and control may be on dumb places on most modern keyboards, but
> above almost everything else, computers should do what the user expects.
> The key has caps lock printed on it, it should be a caps lock key unless
> the user takes action of their own accord to change that.
+1 - and I do switch caps with ctrl because of using
Emacs. nevertheless, what Stephanie says here should be set in stone
and perhaps be part of some sort of Devuan's developers guidelines.
> 2) Terminate X via Ctrl-Alt-Backspace
>
> Seems like an easy, useful, historic way to kill a malfunctioning X.
>
> Strongly agree here. This was a useful function, and the decision to
> disable this by default was shortsighted. There were security arguments
> for disabling it - but for the most part, those arguments were about edge
> cases like kiosks and shared workstations.
+100 - this was an horrible change of default introduced in Xorg configuration
> 3) Disable Print key
>
> All my uses have been unintentional. Does anyone use it deliberately
>
> I personally have it set to launch a screenshot tool and have found that
> to be a common configuration in a lot of desktop environments.
same here
> On the subject of people that get thrown into the console for the first
> time when something breaks, there's a lot of room to improve here. What
> I'd like to see is something reasonably consistent with the curses
> installer that provides a limited degree of handholding. Rather than throw
> people into this automatically, it should be advertised in the default
> MOTD, and it should have fallback to a simple set of prompts in case
> someone's using a broken terminal. The audiences for this are both
> complete newcomers, who know absolutely nothing beyond what little the
> /etc/issue and /etc/motd are telling them, as well as the experienced
> sysadmin who finds themselves on a system where basic facilities like
> networking are down, and needs to restore those easily.
now this gets interesting, you are envisioning a very, very useful
introductory tool and detailing its core functionalities. this is
outstanding in my eyes as the specification for a new, simple software
package someone here may want to work on. It may be done as a simple
shell script using dialog, popup on first start of a terminal with a
simple thicker to switch off.
and maybe such a tool can be a good addition to the
devuan-live-minimal by Katolaz.
>
> - Network configuration wizard to temporarily set up Internet access,
> including bringing up a connection to a WPA2 wireless network, or
> autoconfiguring a network interface via DHCP.
> - Disk mounting wizard to easily and temporarily mount thumb drives.
> - Diagnostic wizard to view hardware details, diagnostics, and logs and to
> copy to a mounted thumb drive to look at from another, more functioning
> system
> - Access to a friendly package manager that automatically discovers
> packages on a mounted thumb drive. (this is for users that end up in this
> position because of needing packages to make the network work)
> - Tools to troubleshoot the display manager.
> - Backrup & Restore utilities
> - Easy access to tutorials and documentation.on the local system, and
> internet.
> - Easy access to appropriate new-user IRC channels.
> - A split screen environment, where documentation can be easily browsed on
> half the screen, and a terminal is available on the other half.
the best docs I know to introduce to CLI are there
http://en.flossmanuals.net/command-line/
they were also translated to spanish:
https://web.archive.org/web/20111225010153/http://translate.flossmanuals.net/CommandLineIntro_es
(only available on archive org, so worthed a place in everyone's backup)
ciao