[GEM Development] DayDream (was NextGem..)

[Shane M. Coughlan]

Ben, I think your deliniation of my future NetBSD project into a GEM/Unix
and a seperate (main) Unix distro is certainly very valid.  Perhaps I should
just use the NextGEM name for the first part, and a different term for the
latter.  I'll think about it.  Anyway, I'll only post about the GEM/Unix
bits to the list, with perhaps an occasional update about how the rest is
going.  In truth most of my work on the Unix front has been happening well
away from this list.  Since I was talking with Liam I've been busy in other
places, and of late I've been playing with the NetBSD lists.  I am in
contact with the person who made a Knoppex-like bootdisk, and will be basing
my project on their work.  What I posted to this list was largely meant to
just keep you guys in the loop of what I was up to.  I'll reduce that
traffic in future.

Peter hit on some points.  I am trying to make a serious effort to address
issues bugging GEM, and I have said before what he mentioned...GEM as it
stands it pretty much hitting the end of the line.  Very soon the
work/result ratio of development on the current system will not make further
updates reasonable.  OpenGEM can only be enhanced so much more before each
successful enhance is more cosmetic than useful.  It changes drivers,
desktops and installs cleanly.  What I need to do next is pretty limited.
- reduce memory load (get rid of some ACCs)
- make install prettier (not really needed)
- add DOS for complete OS (not really needed)
An OpenGEM 3 is possible.  I believe an OpenGEM 4 would be a waste of my
time.  It takes too long to debug this stuff to release generational updates
that offer nothing.
We could do with multitasking and 32bit memory addressing.  Without these
things however...well...GEM is 80086 stuff and as good as it gets.

John, I do think Unix GEM would be useful.  I've said why before.  Hope it
works.

Regards

Shane
http://gem.shaneland.co.uk