Date: Mon, 08 Apr 1996 15:07:41 +0200 From: Marc van Kempen <marc@bowtie.nl> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>, hsu@freefall.freebsd.org (Jeffrey Hsu), gpalmer@freefall.freebsd.org, hackers@freefall.freebsd.org Subject: Re: Netscape install of FreeBSD Message-ID: <199604081307.PAA10398@nietzsche.bowtie.nl> In-Reply-To: jkh's message of Sun, 07 Apr 1996 14:41:38 -0700. <5086.828913298@time.cdrom.com>
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> > > > specifically, Jordan and I talked a bit about using a WWW browser and > > > > CGI scripts to create the configuration manager for post-install stuff > > > > like adding/deleting users, changing /etc/sysconfig, etc. > > > > > > I meant the install install, that is, click a button from Netscape > > > running in Windows or Linux and it goes off and partitions your drive, > > > downloads FreeBSD, installs it, sets up the boot manager, asks you some > > > questions and writes the appropriate files onto the newly created BSD ufs, > > > then reboots. > > > > > > This is an example of network software distribution which everyone seems > > > to want to do with the web. > > > > This is hard. > > > > It's hard because thee is no standard extension for UNIX executables, > > I don't think this is so much an issue. > > You'll recall awhile back that I was calling for a general-purpose > library that would provide an "embedable HTTP server" for an > application, allowing you to specify your "HTML" in some higher-level > syntax that provided for genuine callbacks and such without having to > deal with any of the thoroughly disgusting form and entry field hacks. > You'd just say which entities you wanted in each document or > interaction screen and the library would interact with the HTTP port > like any other server, processing incoming requests and turning them > into standardised callbacks. > I spotted a small library that will do this (embed an HTTP server in your application), and the copyright is BSD-ish. paws http://www.inria.fr/koala/phk.html > The reason I stopped dreaming about this and decided to punt the whole > idea was that I disliked the idea of using only the standard HTML > objects (text, entry fields, buttons, and so on) for doing my > interfaces. How would I display the current disk layout, for example? > As rows of "X"'s or something? Bleah! ASCII art is your department, > not mine.. :-) > > I would far prefer to generate gifs on the fly that represented pie > charts, colored bar graphs (representing the sizes of your various > partitions and free space) and such, but the idea of adding a > generalized rendering API to this whole thing finally brought me up > short with the realization that it was a whole 'nother engineering > project unto itself and I should probably just make the existing tools > work a little nicer before even contemplating such a massive project. > There is another library that will allow you to draw into a giffile. You can produce an executable that will produce an image of a disklayout given the proper parameters and then show it on your page. It also has a reasonable copyright. gd http://siva.cshl.org/gd/gd.html Regards, Marc. ---------------------------------------------------- Marc van Kempen BowTie Technology Email: marc@bowtie.nl WWW & Databases tel. +31 40 2 43 20 65 fax. +31 40 2 44 21 86 http://www.bowtie.nl ----------------------------------------------------
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