cod11,
before I try the geexbox, a few points:
1) I have written a light gui(or a heavy front end) for dos in which tne basic screen is identical to a dos screen, but divided into an upper and lower panel; each panel displays a true dos-screen and can be scrolled independantly, and navigated;
So you can navigate to a file/folder in each of them, and copy from one to the other, going either way. Can also invoke any dos program/command in either one if it it inserted into the 'hub', which is straightforward(I love dos!).
2) the new wrinkle there is that I incorprorated *mouseability* into it, so that the entries on the dos screen can be selected with the mouse!
3) I had thought to port this to linux,but the thing which stumps me is the mouse function.
This is so easy to do in dos using int33-union regs-int86, etc. so that the entire thing with mouse function is a mere 180 kb or so; this means if you keep it off the path, you can put a copy in multiple folders, each an independant "micro desktop" for different projects.
This is anything but easy to do in linux, at least in a modern distro. It seems that the only way to get a mouse function is to grab onto some huge thing involving ncurses-obscure libraries and crisscrossing dependancies whose include.h's are forever under going
"upgrades" with subtle differences. This is why I am extremely interested in how you extracted the mousing from the parted magic;
Do you think a binary of such a thing could work on an elementary linux of choice?(again why I love dos.)
4) Back on point: If I understand you correctly, the gru4dos can pass variables to essentially direct the execution of a startup script in the initrd? If so, would these variables get passed in the main menu.lst of grub4dos?
5) You are scripting mounts,etc at a raw level, but I notice that tiny minimal, once it boots, lists the available devices/partitions in /dev;
the lovely thing is that it lists them as folders by the exact same names in /mnt, and this means you are ready to do:
"sudo mount /dev/xyz /mnt/xyz"
What is twice as lovely is that when you then plug in a usb device, the system automatically recognizes the device, inserts a dev-name into both /dev and /mnt and you are ready to mount it. As an analogy, in c, you can do raw-io or file-io and my little dos gui makes heavey use of schemes in which, say,
"dir name>name.txt";
read name.txt into an array;
parse the entries in name.txt as appropriate
write lines to a bat file;
execute the bat file using 'system()' in c.
While it is true that 'system()' is a little hinky when trying to execute some dos commands directly, it never fails when executing a
script. I think this is also true when compiling c in linux(I use djgpp in dos.)
So my idea is to read the dev and mnt folders at a "higher level" and let the shell do the "heavy-lifting".
Again, tnx; I will try the geexbox.