[Inx] New to INX, willing to help

Peter Garrett inx-one at optusnet.com.au
Sun Nov 9 15:18:36 PST 2008


On Sun, 2 Nov 2008 22:57:09 -0700
Lextori <lextori at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,

I'm late to the party, sorry...

> I think I've found the first open source project I want to help contribute
> to. The power of a CLI is actually really impressive once you go through the
> tutorials. 

/me cheers for a tutorial user! \o/\o/\o/

> I've found that I'm more productive in INX(hard to get distracted
> when all I have is CLI).
> 
> That said I've found a few things I think INX is lacking.

OK, let's see...

> 1. a simple to use IM client, finch comes close and is available through the
> ubuntu repo's but is difficult enough to configure that it may not meet
> INX's needs.

It's also rather large, because of its dependencies. To give an
idea, here are some relevant lines from "apt-get install finch" on a
more-or-less standard INX install:

 sudo apt-get install finch
[snips]
0 upgraded, 9 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
Need to get 3144kB of archives.
After this operation, 26.7MB of additional disk space will be used.

Over 26 MB of space - even after compression with squashfs that's too
big.

 A few team members are looking at
'bitlbee' as a possibility...

> 2. a flashcard application - I've tried looking and not found anything.

Don't know anything about this one...

> 3. a roguelike game, roguelikes are one of the crowing examples of fun games
> that are possible on the console, and have been one of my fav game types for
> ages

Not sure what you mean here, but a while ago I was considering
including "Crawl"...

> 4. an easy way to set up a compose key(on my ubuntu desktop I was able to
> set my cap's lock key as compose with no problems using a dialog.)

This would be nice - not sure yet how to do this in a tty/console...

> I also have one question, how can I turn the numlock on login behavior off,
> I use INX on my laptop and that is quite annoying. Also if anyone can help
> me with setting up a compose key I would apprecate it :)

Well, the next INX version will not turn the numlock on if you are
using a laptop - several people have commented on this. In the meantime,
you can remove the line in /home/inx/.profile that reads

setleds -D +num

or comment it out with a '#' - then log out and in again. On the live
CD this means hitting CTRL+D from a prompt, which will reset the tty
you are working in. On a virtual machine, any logins after making that
edit should disable the numlock.

> So my question to the community is how can I help? I know almost no
> programming(I can putt around in python enough to see what's happening but
> wouldn't trust myself to do much more than a hello world, and ask some
> questions and spit them back at the user)
> 
> I am able to test, and give feedback, as well as suffer through bugs and
> learn something new to be of use.

Your feedback is already helpful - not all INX team members are coders,
and I only know Bash :) If you are familiar with Bash you can look
in /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/lib/inx/ on the CD, or check out
Launchpad at:

https://code.launchpad.net/~inx-devel/inx/scriptsandfunctions

If you want to get into the code, you might want to read David Symons's
excellent post on the subject of using the Bazaar revision control
system with INX:

http://lists.inx.maincontent.net/pipermail/inx-inx.maincontent.net/2008-May/000017.html

I hope this is helpful - and welcome to the INX community!

Peter

-- 
"INX Is Not X" Live CD based on Ubuntu 8.04 : http://inx.maincontent.net
Screenshots slideshow: http://inx.maincontent.net/album/1.png.html



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