[Kde-hardware-devel] GSoC Proposal : S.M.A.R.T HDD health and ISO file / optical disk management

[Anant Kamath]

Hi,
I'm Anant Kamath a 18 yr student planning to apply to participate in GSoC
this year.
I had recently made a rough proposal on a project for S.M.A.R.T HDD
monitoring for KDE in the kde-devel mailing list.
It was suggested that I add additional elements (optical disk/ ISO file
manipulation) to my proposal by Alex Fiestas, make it a more comprehensive
one : to make disk management in KDE more robust.

So here it is:

I) S.M.A.R.T Hard disk reporting and monitoring

1) Create a KDE application similar to GSmartControl to view health of hard
disks , individual S.M.A.R.T attributes
2) A system settings module for scheduling S.M.A.R.T tests and configuring
notifications to be displayed in case the hard disk is failing and
integrate this module in the application too
3)Create a plasma data engine to make the S.M.A.R.T data easily available
to plasma widgets, etc

These would be based on either smartmontools (more exhaustive set of
features) or Udisks + libatasmart (leaner)
It seems a graphical utility is already being developed as part of
KPartitionManager although going by the author's blog post it is only for
reporting and not scheduling/active monitoring and notifying, and has not
made it to a release of KPartitionManager yet.

II) Optical disk / ISO file manipulation: (as suggested by Alex Fiestas)

4)Allow users to create ISO files from optical disks

5)Create an application to mount the ISOs. I hope to make this a simple
application from the user's point of view, which can be completely managed
from the system tray if required

6)Burn ISOs to optical disks

These would be based mostly on libk3b and I would aim to integrate this
with various parts of KDE like having context menus for iso files in
dolphin, etc.
The aim of this part would not be to replace k3b, but allow an
easier/quicker path for users to create and mount ISOs and burn them to
disks


Prior to this I have worked in C++ for mainly my own applications (not
contributing to open source projects) and have been learning and working
with Qt for over a year. I recently made a graphical configuration/settings
utility (http://hashpling.wordpress.com/2012/01/29/beeconf-released/)  for
bumblebee (which provides nvidia optimus support for linux) in python (PyQt
and pyKDE) where I was first exposed to the KDE libraries. In addition I've
been doing the C++ KDE tutorials in the techbase, and have been studying
the source for solid and amarok, among others.

Please tell me what you think about my proposal.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-hardware-devel/attachments/20120317/d8b4a6ca/attachment.html>