[Lancaster] Re: the kitchen network.

[Martyn Welch]

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On Friday 16 July 2004 17:25, Ken Hough wrote:

> A few more thoughts re a CD burning setup.
>
> I'm warming to the idea of setting up a dedicated CD burning box with
> minimum software to allow local use of 'cdrecord' via some sort of non X
> UI. In this way we could have control over the burning parameters and hence
> in theory get better results. Maybe the likes of K3b would allow too much
> for users to play with.
>

cdrecord is the way to go, even K3B uses it to actually burn the CD AFAIK. We 
will need some front end so not to completely baffle users. I agree even K3B 
offers a little to many options.

> A library of ISOs could be kept on the local hard drive and the user
> could log in as say 'cdburner'. root access (or other admin account)
> could allow network access to download/manage ISOs.
>

A library of ISOs would certainly help save on bandwidth. It would be best for 
the device to be permanently logged in with some really basic GUI.

> The UI could be a 'C'/ncurses program. I have used ncurses and would be
> happy to have a go at this. An advantage of this approach is that I
> could develop the program on a test setup at home.
> 

As useful as curses is, especially from a sysadmin perspective, 
unknowledgeable users will run miles from it. It looks to close to the 
command prompt and sometimes isn't the most intuative of interfaces.

If the device is going to have a screen, we may as well use something like 
GTK.

Martyn

- -- 
Martyn Welch (welchm at comp.lancs.ac.uk)

PGP Key : http://ubicomp.lancs.ac.uk/~martyn/pgpkey.html

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