• Guidelines
• Packaging
• FAQ


• Programmers TODO list
• Non-programmers TODO list
• Web HOWTO

Now is the hour for every good man...

1. Fix and improve the installation

   The installation of 6.1 has several annoying bugs like the fact it drops you to console mode in case it does not autodetect the mouse (serial mice are not detected) instead of asking, in addition the console install allows selecting the national keyboard but does nothing about it and the fact it provided no package description in console mode. In addition RedHat installs packages mostly in alphabetical order and that means that sometimes the install scripts of invidual packages break because the utility they neeed installs later.

   In addition add to it the features of Indy 6.0-0.8: a "Personal computer" install class (like Workstation but with a different software selection), configuration for dial up networking at install time. In future releases we would like graceful handling of conflicting packages: until we have this we will unable to provide alternatives to some servers we feel are an overkill in small companies.

   The installtion is mostly written in Python with some C parts.

2. A curses based PPP config front end to Wvdialconf

   RedHat provides an X based tool but this cannot be used for people who have problems with X and for people having to use the console installation. In addition the RedHat tool does not allow the user choosing DNS autoconfiguration. Someone has promised to do the job.

3. Kernel compiling

   This time it looks like RedHat's kernel is bigger than usual so someone must investigate about stuff who could have been built in modules and wasn't. Indy's philosophy is shipping kernels of performance close enough to a hand built one that the user does not need to spend time recompiling it unless this is his idea of fun . In addition it seems that the 2.2.12 kernel shipped in RedHat has several annoying bugs who have been removed in 2.2.13. This is a relatively demanding job.

4. A front end to install-news

   Install-news allows easy configuration of a news server in the way install-sendmail allows easy configuration of sendmail. But it would be better with a front end. By the way the front end Donovan Rebecchi wrote for install-sendmail needs to be upgraded for newer versions of install-sendmail

5. Write Liberators

   They are called assistants in some systems but what would you expect of a project called Independence. :-)

6. A good Samba browser

   We would like providing a tool for exploring the network environment and mounting SMB shares with a mere mouse click. There are four tools available for Linux and none is satisfactory: knetmon relies on KFM, Gnombaand its close cousin Komba use a teminantly brain damaged method of exploring networks. All of these are written in C or C++. The only tool who mostly works is TkSmb but it has several drawbacks like the fact it creates mountpoints on the fly without ever removing them, lack of a graceful termination method or the fact it allows mounting but not unmounting. In addition TkSmb looks like it is no longer maintained. TkSmb is written in expect and uses Tk.

   Pick one of these four and make it work like it should

7. Recompiling using gcc 2.95

   What use for a computer nesides games? :-) Games need speed and gcc 2.95 generates code who is from 5 to 10% faster than the code generated by egcs 1.1.2 used in RedHat (benchmarks run on a K6). Recompiling an entire distribution is a huge work and the best way is install the whole distrib (so autoconf doesn't build software with reduced funtionalities due to msiing libraries) and then rebuild every single package

Things will not just happen...

...if people dont work on them. A small team will be unable to have Indy making significant progress. If you are tired of getting distributions who don't pay attention to your problems, if you want to help in making a distribution made for the people, if you think Linux is a good thing who should be available for everyone instead of a minority then