[gentoo-user] Re: Project:Installer

[James]

<wabenbau <at> gmail.com> writes:



> > I used to install and look after OpenSuse Desk and Laptops until
> > systemd showed it's ugly face. Now I install and look after several
> > Gentoo Xfce desktops and 3 OpenSuse Xfce Laptops. I use a Cut & Paste
> > script to install Gentoo on Desktops. The only manual parts are
> > booting a Gentoo USB stick, modifying hostname, ip address, user
> > names and partitioning. When completed. Wen done, log in as user and
> > set up email accounts and various eye candy.

Sounds reasonable. Wouldn't it be great if that was an automated semantic we
could all use?


> > OpenSuse install on laptop involves booting of a installation USB
> > stick, select Xfce Desktop, manually enter time zone, user name,
> > counry, hostname, ip address, Samba, login as user and and set up
> > email accounts and various eye candy.

> > I am to stupid to install and get Gentoo to work on Laptops.

Um, I disagree. The disk/bios/bootstrap issues are perverted by the
manufacturers, particularly on laptops, tablets and embedded devices
as to soot their business goals; hence on a laptop the preventative issues
are magnified. You are not alone in this struggle.


> > My "dream" would be to have the OpensSuse Yast installer and
> > administration gui to install, configure and maintain Gentoo on
> > Desktops and Laptops. This should be easy for a programmer whois
> > familiar with Ruby and C. The Yast installer and administration gui's
> > are nothing more than gui interfaced to various command line
> > utilities.

If it works, I'd use it, regardless of Yast. Maybe we can find
a person that knows Yast (Ruby  and such) to hire to write a similar
installer for GEntoo?  I'm not against hiring the right person to 
write a gentoo installer:: as long as I get a BTRFS raid 1 base system
out of it. DONE DEAL! If anyone is interested, just drop me some
private email. It has to open sourced.....


> Yast was one of the reasons why I switched from SUSE to gentoo in 2003.
> IIRC one problem with Yast was that it used it's own configuration files
> and not the standard upstream configuration files of the installed
> packages. This sometimes made the manual configuration of packages very
> difficult for me, because the original package documentation refers to
> config files that I could not found on my SUSE system.
> Another caveat was that if one of the Yast config files was altered by
> hand, it was not possible to configure this file with Yast anymore.

> Of course in the beginning of my Linux experience (SuSE 4.2) I was happy
> that there was Yast because I came from OS/2 and it was a nightmare for
> me to configure Linux the first time, even with Yast. Without Yast
> I maybe would not use Linux today. Maybe Yast is better today, but in
> the past it was sometimes very frustrating.


OK, so we need an expert here. Any takers?
Make a few dollars and get famous for writing (hacking) a gentoo
installer for the gentoo-commoners? 

Anyone?
James