From: pdh@netcom.com (P D H) Subject: my list of things to do on linux Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1993 00:01:46 GMT
This is my list of things to do on linux. Things are not apparently in
the FAQ. I have only been able to read the contents list and a few of
the questions at this time. Eventually I will get through all of the
questions and if any information is not well categorized by the question
asked, I can find it then (I have found stuff like this already, and this
does seem to be the norm for most FAQs anyway).
For things not yet answered, those who know may want to answer, or those
who want to know might get in touch with me and see what we can do together
to find out. It would seem silly to have 2 people separately research all
the same stuff just to find out the same things.
1. I want to change the VGA DAC's to hold specific color values. It has
been suggested I look in the vgalib for some VGA related stuff. Maybe
that will be in there, too. It would be really nice if the DACs could
be set distinctly for each virtual console (the driver will have to
keep them and reload them each time there is a change of console).
2. I would like to find out if it is possible to format floppy disks, and
use them with, different sectoring/formatting than the usual to get more
than the standard 1440k on 3.5 HD floppies. There are tools to do
this for DOS, both to format and to make DOS put more filesystem data
on them. Those programs have no source code. I suspect this might need
a floppy driver hack and some changes in fdformat.
3. I want to do fax modem operations from Linux. My initial need is to
send faxes from ordinary ASCII files. Later sending ghostscript would
be nice as well. A simple raw interface would be a useful tool.
Eventually fax reception would be nice, too.
4. I'm still trying to get serial I/O to work. I've run out of IRQs and
apparently none can be moved up to the extended IRQs. I may look into
sharing IRQs and see what I might do to the serial driver to handle
the shared condition (such as always check all serial ports that share
it for every interrupt). I know this is messy and unsafe, but there
isn't much else to do unless someone wants to give me one of those 4 port
serial cards and a couple of modems.
5. I want to make the kernel easy to compile without touching the kernel
sources in the standard place. I think I now have a way to do this
with only a hack to the first Makefile and a shell script in front.
I'll probably be trying this out tonight (thanks to HJ Lu for the info).
Then I want to make sure my hack won't defeat things others do so it
can be eventually incorporated into the kernel source tree setup.
6. I am planning a program that will handle writing raw data on floppy
disks. The idea is to make it possible to write a bunch of data to
a stack of floppies with a pipeline like:
tar cf - . | gzip | fdwrite /dev/fd0
and read it back like:
fdread /dev/fd0 | gunzip | tar xvpf -
What the fdwrite and fdread programs would do is instruct you to insert
the correct floppy in the drive in sequence. It would be something like:
fdwrite: insert blank floppy number 6 and press return (ESC to abort)
There would be no filesystem per se on the floppy this way. It would
be strictly a sequential concept. If you want a filesystem, Linux has
that already.
The features I would like to include would be to format the floppy as
this process is being done. I would ideally like to interleave the
formatting and writing on a track by track basis. Verification can
therefore verify that the actual data is written. I am wondering if
there is any way to make the floppy controller write my data instead
of the standard format_fill_byte during the format pass to speed this.
I would also want to had the fdwrite program try to write the first
track and do the format only if it fails (with options to abort instead
of format, or to always format). Then there is the issue of whether to
format all the remaining tracks when the data does not fill up the last
floppy. That perhaps should be an option, and might require doing the
"if write fails, format and write again" method on each track.
It is this program that inspired the question of squeezing more data
onto a floppy. Any suggestions or hints for this?
-- | Phil Howard, pdh@netcom.com, KA9WGN Spell protection? "1(911)A1" | | Right wing conservative capitalists are out to separate you from your MONEY | | Left wing liberal do gooders are out to separate you from EVERYTHING ELSE!! | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+