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Hey Gentooers, |
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|
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*Intro* |
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Gentoo Anaconda is a fork of Sabayon Anaconda which is a fork of |
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Fedora/Red Hat Anaconda. Anaconda is an installer for Linux disros, |
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originally for Fedora/RH but now it's distro-independent and many |
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other distros use it as their installer. Sabayon is a binary distro |
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based on Gentoo. |
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|
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*Where are we?* |
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The installer can install a Gentoo and configure all the settings that |
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appear on the installer screens. The mirror support is still a little |
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buggy but not terribly so. The settings on the screens are the ones |
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included in the first part of the handbook, after the installer is |
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done you should reboot into a nice, basic but working Gentoo install. |
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It can also install xorg and a desktop environment, but it's still |
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unable to perform any additional actions that might be needed. This is |
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something I need to put some more work into, but since I don't know |
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all the environments that well, I'll need to talk to some people who |
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do before I can implement that. |
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Custom kernel support exists, and is in the code, but it's disabled as |
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it's not fully working (I did say on my original proposal that I can't |
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promise this one). Once I can polish it off, I will enable the |
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appropriate screen. |
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There is a bug in one of the packages that Anaconda depends on, which |
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can sometimes result in the installer hanging during the installation, |
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but I think the bug is in the ebuild. Since dependencies are not the |
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project itself, I don't consider this as an Anaconda bug. |
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*Where to go now?* |
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Overall, I feel that I've satisfied my original proposal of creating a |
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working, usable Gentoo installer. It's been fun but it's still a long |
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way to go before it can become a more official installer. I would like |
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to become a Gentoo developer so I can work on the installer further. |
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One of the first things I'd like to do is to write a proper, |
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interface-agnostic, installer backend, that the Anaconda installer, or |
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any other Gentoo installer will be able to use to query the available |
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options and run actions in a standard way. I would also like to write |
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a better error handling during the installation phase, as sometimes |
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packages fail to emerge for various reasons (failed to download, ran |
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out of memory etc., the usual stuff). I will also continue my |
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never-ending quest of slimming Anaconda down as there's still a lot of |
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dead/useless code in the tree (but figuring out what can go and what |
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should stay is a task on its own). |
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The source code is available in the Git repo, so are the installation |
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instructions. Details are available at |
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<http://soc.dev.gentoo.org/~wiktor/>. |
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|
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Thanks to everyone, special thanks to my mentor Calchan and the releng |
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team for the awesome LiveDVDs that I keep spinning. |
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|
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~ wiktor. |
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