Google Summer of Code idea

[Jan Wrobel]

Hi,

I would like to take part in this year Google Summer of Code and I
have an idea of a project that maybe interesting for you. Please write
what do you think about it.

I am thinking about network configuration facilitation for Linux Live
CD distribution - program that will try to get network configuration
from Windows registry.  It can check out if there are any Windows
partitions, try to mount them read only and look if there is registry
file at some standard locations. Reading registry can be painful but
there are some open source programs that can read data from this file
so it is doable. At the beginning it can only be some command line
program or option in network configuration tool, but if it works well
it can be run at Live CD startup.

I think that it would be very useful feature. A lot of Live CD users
are Linux newbies who have Windows on a drive, not every one has DHCP
configured and getting network running is a hard task for a
beginner. I think it is important to make this first contact with
Linux as smooth as possible.

I've wrote already to Fedora Live CD developers but it turned out that
Fedora doesn't have NTFS read only support and doesn't plan to have it
in a future. But Ubuntu Live CD supports NTFS, so what do you think
about this idea? Do you think it is something useful for Ubuntu
project and is it possible that I will find a mentor for it if I write
a good proposal?

Regards,
Jan Wrobel