Re: Introduction and proposal:

Riley Williams
2002-04-22T20:58:40Z

Hi Erich.

> Anyway, Ive been playing with ELKS on my 286 laptop for a couple of
> weeks now, and i think its way cool. Especially since the hard disk
> has long since been kaput.

It's good to see others are interested. Welcome aboard.

> I've read a couple emails about the documentation for this project,
> and I concur that it does need improvement. I would like to help out
> with documenting this project, while I learn enough about the OS to
> maybe start helping with code.

You're certainly welcome to do that.

> One of the things I've thought would be neat, is a guide to the
> source code of ELKS, like a programmers manual. Is this something
> that is needed? Or would my time be better spent working on other
> documentation?

To be honest, the ELKS documentation in general falls into one or more
of the following categories:

1. Hopelessly out of date.

2. Abysmal English. Apparently, the non-English versions are far
easier to follow than the English ones. (I can't confirm this
as the only three languages I speak with anything approaching
fluency are English and American).

3. Ambiguous phraseology, largely as a result of (1) above.

Anything you can do to help with ANY of the ELKS documentation that
currently exists, or to create QUALITY new documentation, would be
appreciated by far more than just me.

> Another of the projects related to ELKS that I've been considering,
> is a good vt100 emulator, and/or a serial library that would make
> ELKS good for controlling devices over a serial line, but I won't be
> able to consider working on that till the end of the summer at the
> earliest.

I started on a VT100 emulator a while back, but got little further than
documenting some of the control sequences used. ELKS itself uses VT52
sequences for video control, so the emulator would basically consist of
a tool that receives VT100 sequences and generates the equivalent VT52
sequence. If you're interested, I have a genuine VT100 manual that lists
all the codes supported by the hardware in question.

As regards the serial library, ELKS already supports SLIP links, and I
understand that requires the kernel to provide pretty much complete
serial support, so that is probably an unnecessary project.

> Anyway, thats all from me, I just figured I would consult you all
> about the documentation thing.

The basic instruction there has to be "Go ahead".

Best wishes from Riley.