Re: [gentoo-dev] Installer For Gentoo

[Stephen Clowater]

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Patrick Lauer wrote:
| On Wed, 2004-01-14 at 17:02, Stephen Clowater wrote:
| <snip>
|
|>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.
|
| you could always create one "default" disk image and clone it ...

This is great for a homogenous server enviornment. However, most server
and rendering envirnments are not homogenous, therefore, by using a disk
image, have to compile for a very high level (like i686) arch, and then
clone that. And when I do that, whats the point of using gentoo? why not
just use redhat? I cant get the optimization in my binarys with gentoo
if i try to clone a good istall in a heterogenous enviorment.

|
|
|> 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.
|>
|
| GLIS + kudzu (hardware detection) + default metapackages

GLIS + kudzu + portage to merege all selected packages was what i was
thinking. first off, rsync. Parse the portage tree, and give the user a
list of packages they put a check in and they will be installed.
Orginize the list by catagories, whihc the portage tree already does for
us :)

|
| (e.g. "kde" , "development" , "webserver")
| These metapackages could be empty ebuilds that depend on some default
| packages.
|
|
|> 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.
|
| Do we want that? I changed to gentoo because it is not user-friendly
| like RedHat or SuSE. I don't see why gentoo should be dumbed down, but
| if you want an installer, feel free to create one. It's all about choice
| :-)

Obviously as you point out, the installer can't be mandatory, nor can
anything we are talking about here. If this were to eventually get on
the liveCD, there would obviously be a boot option for noinstaller and
the installer would never load.

As you point out none of this can be "manditory" perhaps even run the
istaller on one vc, show the output of the commands being executed on
the next vc, and have normal consoles on all the other vcs.

|
|
|>Secondly, it _is_ a bit of a pian to not have a
|>wizard I can simply point and click thru.
|
| How often do you install?
| And doesn't GLIS do most of the configuration?
| (I haven't used it, so I don't have an opinion)

GLIS dos the work after you tell it all the settings for the system. The
installer I am talking about would just produce the conf file and a
make.conf for GLIS, and use GLIS (which I assume uses portage) to
compile the rest.

the way i would like it to fit in would whatever comes of this would go
over GLIS, and GLIS would go over portage.

|
|
|> 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 heard many knowledgable linux users state that they learned a lot
| about  while installing gentoo.
|
| I'm not oposed to an installer per se, but I don't want a default
| install forced upon me.

Exactly, the goal in mind here is also to have an installer, but not to
intergrate it in such a way that you do not have a choice.

|
|
|
|>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
|
| sounds ok.
|
|
|>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.
|
| But shouldn't we give a default binary install?
| Most users don't want to wait while the system compiles and compiles ...
|

But thats the thing that makes gentoo unique, the fact that it can all
be compiled. Obvioulsy there would start up and would have 4 options,
and explanations of the pros and cons of those 4 options.
1 - bootstrap - stage 1 - compile everything
2 - system - stage 2 - use stage2 for the bootstrap, compile everything else
3 - user - stage 3, have a basic system from the stage3 and compile all
user selected packages
4 - binary - stage 3 + use binary packages for anything a user selectes

|
|>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.
|
| kernel config = genkernel?

I mean to generate a .config file for the kernel, and then compile the
kernel. genkernel dosnt determine the appropriate configurations for a
given kernel

|
|
|>So in summery, using glis as our backend, we really only need to
|>
|
|
|>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)
|
| but then you need an ncurses based gui and a "graphical" (nice) installer
| That might be a lot of work.

This is were I am unsure of how to proceed, I want a pretty gui, but i
want it to be simple, and lightweight. I'm not sure exactly how to
design one of those.

|
|
|>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?
|
| pretty gui = Tk on XFree86?
| 	 Qt based?
| etc. etc.
|
| There are many options, and it will enlarge the install CD even more.
|
| What I would prefer to an installer is a unified interface for all
| configuration utilities (gcc-config, java-config, portage, ...)
| and maybe some "simple" tools for webserver vhosting, network config
| etc.
|
| But that's just my opinion ;-)

And a very good one :) obviously, as i said, there would be a version of
the cd with this on it, and one without, and the one with this, would
have the option to bypass it. and in fact, there would be other vcs
behaving exactly the same way as normal, so bypassing it would be a
simple of a few keypresses.

As to how to do the GUI, I'm not sure, how to do that, we want it to be
as light wieght as possible, and flexable, but very simple. So how to do
it is sort of something I would like to have some discussion about and
hear some ideas.

|
| Patrick
|
|
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| gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list
|


- --
Stephen Clowater

Everything in this book may be wrong.
		-- Messiah's Handbook : Reminders for the Advanced Soul

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; }

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