[gentoo-user] Re: Project:Installer

[Hans]

On 27/07/15 03:29, James wrote:
> <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
>
>
>
>
>
I don't really think that there is a requirement for Ruby. Today's Yast2
is simply a GUI like grsync that calls on command line utilities. This 
can be done using the GTK C library.  The Yast running in a terminal 
appears to be a ncurses interface to the same command line utilities.

I could, with some help from a Bash coder, create a USB stick that runs 
Gentoo and a Bash script to install Gentoo on a hard drive. I have about 
80% done as Cut & Paste "script". My bottleneck is running fdisk and 
feeding commands to fdisk from within a bash script.

Running Gentoo from a USB stick with Grub static is no problem if you 
don't mind that its sloooow. I use 2TB USB drive with Gentoo Xfce 
installed to back up my families Laptops. Plug in the USB drive. Power 
on the Laptop, Login as Laptop-1. Click the Backup or Restore Icon to 
start the required rsync session. Have lunch or surf the net.

Will make a image for a USB stick with or without Xfce if someone is 
seriously interested. This USB stick require DHCP from a router for 
networking and have only VGA video.