EDE - Personal Suggestions and Ideas

[Miguel Bolanos <mike@linuxlabs.com>]

Greetings,

As a result of the fact that ELKS seems to be back to life, I have been
thinking myself a lot of things.. as you may have noticed i encouraged
everyone in the mailing list to provide the developers some input what
they  consider the future of elks should be, so i also have somethings
in mind that i want to see accomplished, and that i will for sure work
hard on.

Some days ago a journalist send me an email asking for the advantages
that elks has to offer to the countries of the 3rd world, due to the
fact that elks is intended to run on very old machines... the kind of
machines that can be easily found over there... later.. a very realistic
comment came up on the IRC channel "People now days is so used to
machines with HUGE processor, memory and storage capacities, that are
not longer aware of the things that can be done with machines that have
limited resources.", this is indeed very true, old operating systems
used to make many useful things with this kind of boxes.. and there are
even very interesting projects around that could be in someway or
another ported to elks.. more specifically become part of EDE.

Many people have made me the question this 2 questions:

"What's the purpose of ELKS?"
"What's your goal on your ELKS contribution?"

I personally believe that we should focus ELKS on not a "for fun"
project but turn serious, now I'm not willing to be misunderstood here..
but i believe that more than wish lists we should have very well defined
goals for the project.

I would like to say that my personal goal, is get a kernel that has:

- TCP/IP support. (Yes Alan i know we already have, i just want to 		 
point each thing i believe important even if it 		  already exists)
- PPP support
- Support for various NICs
- swap support
- maybe ext2fs support.

Then get EDE to have the following features:

- Capable of been installed on a hard disk ( i know, done)
- Boot loader
- Maybe implement something like bootsplash or Linux Progress Patch
- X support.. perhaps Microwindows can be the solution?
- An internet browser
- a Gui mail client
- maybe an irc client
- A little "office" suite

With only this little features we could make a HUGE contribution not
only to the countries in the 3rd world, but in many others that have a
very unstable economy and can't afford to have the top of technology to
empower the education for example, now doing this won't mean that ELKS
will no longer be intended for embedded systems (just in case anyone
misunderstands me)

Anyways this is just my personal little idea - project, hopefully others
will share my vision.

Comments, suggestions, improvements.. are very welcome :)
best wishes

Mike