MEPIS Community Forum

Brooko's posting of Warren's email to us has caused me to think about this a bit again, and I would like some feedback and discussion on a possible development direction.

Tabs
1) The app currently has 5 tabs: Repair, General, Mouse, Monitor, and Nvidia. It seems to me that the middle 3 (italics) are no longer necessary, since System Settings has those under control.
2) Instead of Nvidia, I would propose a tab called "Drivers," that would help the user install a new driver. More below.
3) That would leave 2 tabs: "Repair" and "Drivers," with the possibility of adding a third (> below).

Repair
Don't see any reason to change what is there now, though maybe the M11 setup introduces new wrinkles.

Drivers
The following elements could be on this tab:
--"Caution: lorem ipsum" a short paragraph of caution, with longer treatment behind the Help link (> Manual)
--"Your current video driver:" followed by the output of which is run when the app opens
--"You can upgrade your driver here:" followed by the URL of the appropriate vendor's installation page (e.g., http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us) derived by matching the output of lspci against a table of vendors and sites (possibly using http://www.linux-drivers.org/display.html, though they do not have the best page for Nvidia IMHO).
--If the output contains either ATI or Nvidia, then there appears a final line: "You may also use an easy-to-follow script:" with a link to either the Wiki or the Manual on sgfxi. Alternate proposal: point to new tab.

Sgfxi
If we have the time, talent and inclination, I wonder if a tab with a simple GUI for sgfxi would be helpful. The tab would only appear if the output from lspci on opening the app contained Nvidia or ATI.
--First short description, source statement, disclaimer and caution.
--Then ask user if OK to install the sgfxi script.
--Minimal question/response sequence if any
--Log window?
--End with a note that more options and finer control are available by running the script itself in a root terminal.
--Help button would point to Manual and, beyond, to sgfxi documentation page (http://smxi.org/docs/sgfxi-manual.htm)

The new tab does not look complicated *to me*, since the scripts behind it already exist. And I seem to remember somebody (anti?) pointing to an existing GUI we could consult. Thoughts?

Intel should be included too.

Looks like a good blueprint.

I would prefer a separate tab for sgfxi. Also sgfxi needs to be run as root out of X. So I am not sure how you could handle that when mxconfig is run in X, even for a basic no options install. Unless you log out of X with the code, and use the sgfxi feature to restart X when completed. Or am I missing something?

.
I was wondering the same thing.

On my hardware sgfxi will run entirely in a KDE4 Konsole within X if I use it's -X option. All I then need to do is end the KDE session and restart X.

I do realize my setup may be the exception and you wouldn't want to add that method to mxconfig if it didn't work with most other hardware setups as well.

Sort of on topic, I thought I had seen mentioned that Ikey from the Mint/LMDE forums was trying to add some type of gui to sgfxi/smxi (I wonder if he uses that -X option?) . Maybe it would be worth collaborating with him.

In an earlier post, h2-1 saidWe would need to test on M11 and a bunch of machines.

I see that in a post from Jan 22 he had an app working, though not yet out.

What's the reason for running sgfxi with a GUI? Feels like making it to complicated. To me the beauty of the script is it's simplicity.
A button that takes you to runlevel 3 and starts sgfxi should be enough.
Or am I missing something?
Henry

The fear some people have about working at the command line.

Newbies and scripts do not mix well, as they have said many times on this forum.

But maybe all we do is have a description/caution, a download button, and a start button. On clicking the last, they are dropped out of X and off they go and keep hitting Return. That would save them some steps which they are not used to...

This is just a discussion topic ATM.