On 07/27/2011 09:32 PM, Chris Tooley wrote:
On 11-07-27 12:01 PM, Yasha Karant wrote:
On 07/27/2011 11:46 AM, Chris Tooley wrote:
On 11-07-27 10:25 AM, Yasha Karant wrote:
I have found that modern CUPS printer support configuration tools under
EL have a fairly complete data base of the drivers/parameters needed for
vendor specific printers.
To some extent, this seems to include even reverse engineered data for
printers for which the vendor will not provide any detailed public
specifications and only provides proprietary "drivers" to the monopoly
(and sometimes, Apple).
Given various comments and suggestions that have appeared concerning the
proper Linux formatting/partitioning and use of some current SATA hard
drives that no longer present the 512 byte standard to the operating
system, could SL (or RH or something equivalent to the CUPS team or ...)
provide a data base for drives similar to the CUPS one for printers?
For example, during the initial installation of either a new drive or a
new major release of the OS (e.g., going from EL 5 to EL 6), the drive
partitioning/formatting utility would recognize the drive(s) in use and
automatically set either acceptable or "optimal" parameters.
If such a data base exists, relevant URLs and/or RPMs would be
appreciated.
Yasha Karant
This may be a suggestion that would be more pertinent to the upstream
vendor, as I understand it SL doesn't actually do any development to
modify or add to the EL base upon which SL is built. :)
If it's already been done, I haven't heard about it - that's not to say
it doesn't exist though ;)
-Chris
My understanding is that "CUPS is the standards-based, open source
printing system developed by Apple Inc. for Mac OS® X and other
UNIX®-like operating systems" quoted from http://www.cups.org/ .
Thus, CUPS is from a .org, not from a vendor, or even an
academic/government entity such as Fermilab or CERN. Hence, although SL
and even RH would not the establishing body, it is appropriate for SL,
not just RH, to spearhead such an initiative for another appropriate
.org entity . If Fermilab/CERN have sufficient resources, they could
develop such a data base for use with gparted or other open source
non-volatile storage (e.g., disk) subsystems.
Yasha
True, however, Redhat has more resources with regards to development of new software (people who are extremely familiar with linux architecture, at least)
than SL.
I'm not trying to say that you *shouldn't* suggest this stuff to the SL list, just that it would be more *likely* to get implemented if suggested to RH - or
perhaps even a large server HDD vendor such as Seagate(unlikely) or Intel(SSDs, right? Also they do a lot of work in the kernel). Not to mention that the
rate of uptake in the rest of the Linux community would be greater if supported by a larger vendor.
As I understand SL's structure, they have about 3 people who are dedicated to implementing a RH-branding free EL for the scientific community so they "reduce
duplicated effort of the labs, and have a common install base for the various experimenters". If there are people developing for SL - it's most likely for
software to do with scientific applications which run *on* SL - for instance, ROOT. I think it's out of scope for the SL maintainers to spearhead a software
initiative... My interpretation could be wrong though, anyone from SL care to correct me on that?
You are absolutely right.
Urs
