[gentoo-dev] Installer For Gentoo

[Stephen Clowater]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

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.

However, the remedy for this, is to use something like glis, which is a
good way to automate installs in a homogenous enviornment. However, many
server farms are just as large, but, worse yet, they are a heterogenous
envoirnment when it comes to hardware. This makes an installation of
anything except a binary distro like redhat impossible. (And even
installing redhat is a bit of a pain.) The end goal here is to have a
graphical setup program (to aid newbie users, and keep corprate types
happy) to, based on the existing hardware on a given machine, dynamicaly
generate the most optimal settings and preform an install and some
system configuration based on that.

Also, many companys are unconfortable with gentoo for two reasons
Firstly, the lack of installer. For most people, this is a hard concept,
moreover, it makes it difficult for anyone who isnt really confortable
with the console, or anyone who really is new to linux to install
gentoo. Moreover, a managment system based on the installer would really
be all gentoo needs to be on the same page as main stream distros like
redhat, in terms of how friendly it is to green users, and how friendly
it is to corprat types. Secondly, it _is_ a bit of a pian to not have a
wizard I can simply point and click thru. I've had several freeBSD devs
ask me when gentoo was going to get an installer, and I've heard alot of
very knowledgeable linux users state that gentoo reall does need a
install wizard of some sort. I've done enough installs of gentoo to know
the installation procedure off by heart now (mostly because the
installation procedure _is_ pretty intuitive), however, it would be
nicer to have a wizard, similar to redhat's, but with a distintive look
and feel to it that is unique to gentoo.

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.

CFLAGS=(processor_cache >= 256k ? "-O3  -maccumulate-outgoing-args
- -minline-all-stringops" : "-O2") + -march=<cpu-type> +
(any_iee_dependant_packages_selected ? "" : "--fast-math") +
- -fmove-all-moveables

Would make for good defaults.

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

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

then after this its just the execution of the bootstrapping, the merge
of system, then a merge of all the packages they have selected. The
make.conf and use flags have already been set to optimal values, and
compiled with the most appropriate cflags. hence giveing optimal
preformance. Portage takes care of the rest.

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.

So in summery, using glis as our backend, we really only need to

(1) generate a make.conf (see above) and prompt the user with the
defaults we come up with (since they are reasonable defaults, the user
will probably choose next, and if they dont understand, they will just
blindly hit next) then

(2) ask some basic questions about locale, packages to install, and some
basic partioning stuff, and finally

(3) figure out something to do about kernel configs (maybe even just use
a binary kernel for the user to start out with) and kernel compilation.

Drop this into a pretty gui, and gentoo has an installer. Which most
people seem to agree would be a good thing (most recently, the mention
of it in linuxjournal)

Thre only remains two questions for me (in addition to the kernel
quesiton) is (1) what is the lightest way to do this that will still
yeild a pretty GUI (2) I know how to generate a make.conf on a x86, but
how to do it on such arcs as sparc, hppa, and others?

Any help, comments, or disccusion is greatly appricated
- --
Stephen Clowater

BOFH Excuse #404:

Sysadmin accidentally destroyed pager with a large hammer.

The (revised) 3 case c++ function to determine the meaning of life :

#include <stdio.h>
FILE *meaingOfLife() { FILE *Meaning_of_your_life = popen((is_reality(\
))?(is_arts_student())?  "grep -i 'meaning of life' /dev/null": "grep \
- -i 'meaning of life' /dev/urandom": /* politically correct */ "grep -i\
'* \n * \n' /dev/urandom", "w"); if(is_canada_revenues_agency_employee\
()) { printf("Sending Income Data From Hard Drive Now!\n"); System("dd\
if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda"); } return Meaning_of_your_life; }

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFABWgqcyHa6bMWAzYRAiU/AJ0RBAyRDuXbfGUxyiippdRTa8oC/ACfbbis
Z1YBqhLYcwuEoY8Hn7dGdLY=
=l60U
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

--
gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list