Looking for students to work on sysinst (the NetBSD installer) for GSoC 2010

[Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost>]

Hi folks,

as you probably noticed, NetBSD is part of Google's Summer of Code again
this year (http://netbsd.org/changes/#gsoc2010-announce).

There are lots of interesting projects suggested here:

   http://netbsd.org/contrib/soc-projects.html

But right now I'd like to point you at two pet projects of mine: 

   http://netbsd.org/contrib/soc-projects.html#sysinst-xinterface
and
   http://netbsd.org/contrib/soc-projects.html#sysinst-enhancements


The first project is about a X windows version of sysinst (without rewriting
it). The idea is to have a full grown X setup on the install CD, and fire
up Xsysinst instead of sysinst if you are using a framebuffer console.
[Don't worry about X setup here, the task is Xsysinst, not the install CD,
which, of course, would be a welcome, but optional part.]

If you are a student, have X programing experience and would like
to do a bit of "framework work", this is a good project for you. You don't
even need to have a spare machine to do test-installs on. This will be an
interesting experience in "portability" in a quite unusual way (for NetBSD
standards). And the results will directly help to enhance the user experience
for people trying to install NetBSD.

The other project is about teaching sysinst to do some tasks menu driven that
right now you would have to do manually before starting sysinst. It is no
rocket science, but needs a bit more background experience and
experimentation with creating raid sets or cgd setups. If you already have
expereience doing such setups with NetBSD manually, the project will be quite
simple. If not, aquiring this know how will be a step during the project and
bring you background knowledge for low level system/administration tasks.

Please apply for these, or some of the other fascinating NetBSD GSoC projects!


Martin