Subject: Bug#3488: basedisks modconf problems

From: Ian Jackson <[email-masked]>, Stephen Early <[email-masked]>, Owen Dunn <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 96 02:16 BST

Package: rootdisk
Version: 1996_6_11

* If you ask for a module to be installed and try to install it again
it doesn't notice.  It also doesn't set the `+' or `-' appropriately.
In order to get it to recalculate the display, and allow you to undo
what you've just done, you have to leave the relevant section and come
back into it.

* When you exit from a menu in modconf, it should return your cursor
to your earlier location in the previous menu.

* On the module selection screens there is a highlightable blank line
between `exit' and `block'.  Selecting this line doesn't seem to do
anything.

* Under `internet modules' there is only one module, named `*', with
no description.  Selecting it doesn't seem to do anything.  If you try
to install the `*' module under ipv4 it says `cannot locate module
console', which seems rather surprising ...

* The selection list of modules in each section ought to say at the
top somewhere what the section is.

* There is no comment for `xd' under block drivers, or for `cdrom'
under cd drivers, or for `affs', `binfmt_java' or `ufs' in the
filesystems section, or for `serial' under misc.

* What on earth is binfmt_java and what business does it have being
anywhere near the kernel ?

* There needs to be a comment saying what to do if your hardware isn't
listed - the answer being that either it's compiled in already and you
don't need a module for it, or that it's not supported.  It would be
nice if some docs could be put on the root disk, so that they can be
displayed to the user, or even on the boot disk as plain text files
that can be read from MSDOS or anything that can read an MSDOS floppy.

(This bug was encountered during a test installation of 1.1 done by
the three of us.)

Ian.

---

From: Buddha Buck <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 02 Jul 1996 03:55:01 -0400

> anywhere near the kernel ?

Binfmt_java is a module to load and execute Java binaries.  It requires a working Java interpreter to be useful.  At this point, that seems to be the Java SDK from Sun.

It exists because late in the development of Linux 1.3, someone noticed that Micro$oft, and others, were promising to integrate Java into the OS, and someone else wrote a quick hack kernel module to support a Java binary module.  It exists solely for bragging rights (Linux was first OS with Java support integrated into the OS).  It does -not- interpret any Java code itself, but rather detects the Java magic number, and invokes a user-space Java interpreter (sold separately).

-- 
--
     Buddha Buck                      [email-masked]
"Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our
liberty depends upon the chaos and cacaphony of the unfettered speech
the First Amendment protects."  -- A.L.A. v. U.S. Dept. of Justice