Hi Edoardo,
Another few general considerations: the learning curve of Sculpt is pretty fast, I don't know why, but after few days I increased the feeling with the OS, the documentation played a fundamental role in it, Have you thought to implement also a touch screen mode for Sculpt? may be extremely interesting for smartphones.
Indeed. We plan to work on that throughout the year. Please have a look at [1] (including a video) for a first glimpse.
[1] https://genodians.org/skalk/2021-01-16-genode-mobile-tech-demo
One good point is the "inspect" shell, fast and portable, I like it, only one problem: too few tools under /bin are available, apart vim, there is not many things you can do with it, my idea for fixing that could be to add few more useful tool:
I already mentioned in a reply to an earlier posting of you [2] that I have to disappoint you here. The inspect shell will eventually go away. It is merely a stepping stone [3]. The system shell will prevail of course.
[2] https://lists.genode.org/pipermail/users/2021-January/007475.html [3] https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/20.02#Redesign_of_the_adminis...
one idea could be the microsed implementation, it is around 25kb and permits to modify files through Regexp, only downside for this implementation: still many commands crashes (-e is an example). (sorry for the zip of the last time, I had not the idea of how peoples are suspicious on compressed files haha), the files are sed.h, sedcomp.c, sedexec.c and the relative Makefile;
We have a port of GNU sed already. One would just need to step up and package a shell runtime with it, similar to the system shell.
Another hint: upgrade the md5sum (maybe in the future) to something more secure, I don't know if Sculpt uses it for more complex (and security related) tasks but is strongly discouraged.
We kept md5sum merely as a tool to quickly calculate checksums. It is handy when copying files from/to flaky USB sticks. It is not used for anything important let alone security-critical.
Final suggestion: One day I tried to install as much software as I can on Sculpt, the result was quite strange, I wasn't able to scroll down the Leitz. enviroment, do you know if is possible to do it? { the photo is 5ECB60B5-C98C-496D-9A9D-ECB617AD6809 }
That's a known limitation. I agree that it is inconvenient, so I keep it in the back of my mind. For regular Sculpt power users, it is not really a pressing issue since the /config/deploy file can be edited directly also (the graph is just a fancy frontend for editing this file).
Norman, As the first thing, I've started to port a working Italian layout keyboard, the current version is in the email attachment (file: it_IT.chargen), only problem, certain letters are unavailable (like è, ò, à, ù, § and £), could you try to fix it? the big works for upper keys is already done and tested, (everything works well).
Cool that you came up with an intermediate solution. I'm afraid that I'm the wrong person to ask for fixes as I have never typed any of these characters in my whole life.
Maybe - but that is just speculation - the issue lies not the chargen file but that the font lacks those symbols? In Sculpt, we use a TTF-font with Latin-1 characters only to keep the image small.
As a general direction, I'd encourage the creation of alternative font_fs packages that satisfy different tastes and (Unicode-)needs. This font_fs can then used by all components deployed on Sculpt. Sculpt does not need to be modified for that.
Another few things to ask:
Do you confirm that Sculpt, for now, has NO API or syscall available?
Confirmed.
it would be pretty useful for me to write tools in C with a nice syscall system, my idea could be to implement a programming language designed only for this OS which offers both high and low-level capabilities, (like Inferno's os Limbo programming language), I've started thinking on it, if you agree, in the next days I can try to design the main body of it (in PURE c, the best by test).
The lowest level you can get on Genode is the use of the raw Genode C++ API. Even the C runtime lives above that.
I'd generally recommend to just use the C runtime when hosting C programs on top of Genode. [In principle, you can of course interact with the underlying kernel using system calls, using C. But this results in programs tied to a particular kernel. It really goes against the grain of Genode]
Cheers Norman