Re: [gentoo-dev] Installer For Gentoo

[Robin H. Johnson]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2004 at 12:02:52PM -0400, Stephen Clowater wrote:
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> Hi All, I've recived some good responses and seen some good discusion
> from my inital post.
>
> There are two things I think need to be cleared up first.
>
> In order for gentoo to become a distro that can be used in corprate
> enviornments, it needs an installer that can do much of the
> configurations on it. For example, if I have a rendering farm of 1000
> sgi machines, and I want to install gentoo on all of them, under the
> conventional systme, that just isnt pratical.
Even the conventional redhat installs aren't practical for network-size
installs. System imaging is definetly the way to go for the most part
for such setups, but nothing should preclude having some automated
program that can take a configuration file, so that I can boot off a CD,
run a single command and leave the box going (or even integrate that
command into the netboot/cd init). I've got 5 1/2 machines running
Gentoo at home presently, 3 of those are for my development work only,
and get re-installed approx once a month to test various things from a
clean state.

Cutting short most of the rest of your email here, with such an
automated install, I'd far far prefer that the entire configuration can
be specified explictly, and not be detected in any way.

> Now, I know for the most part, what needs to be done to generate
> configuration options on x86, what I am not sure about, is how to do it
> on other archs, such as sparc or hppa. For example, CFLAGS for x86 in
> make.conf are easy.
I wrote genflags for this reason exactly (and I know that the CHOST
value is wrong atm in it). It works on all platforms Gentoo does, and
some Gentoo doesn't even.

> for USE, you can make a list that includes of any package selected by
> the user, that has a corrisponding entry in use.desc in
> /usr/portage/profiles
This is inherantly bad. As an example, I have mysql installed, but the
ONLY package I compile with USE=mysql is PHP. Likewise I compile PHP
with USE="-java -qt", as I don't want java or qt support in there.

> after this we just make sure in the package list, the user chooses a
> cron dameon, and system logger, and add a few very common things (like
> netkit-telnetd) which can be checked as default
*chokes on mention of telnet in a default install*
SSH _only_ never telnet unless you absolutely have to.
Again, this can be just specified in a configuration file.

> The only other thing that we come to that we should find a good way to
> do is kernel configuration. I konw we can simply compile everything as
> modules by default, and let the the system load them on an as-needed
> basis. However, I am wondering if there is a particular pattern of
> regexs that can be used on /proc/pci to determine installed hardware? I
> know we can ascertain ide or scsi by looking at /proc/partions.
Look at /usr/share/hwdata/pcitable from hwdata-knoppix, that provides
the PCI stuff.

-- 
Robin Hugh Johnson
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