[gentoo-dev] Re: I am not a touch typest. Wish I were.

[Mark Gordon <spamtrap@ruddygore.net>]

On Sun, 21 Jul 2002 00:15:27 +0200
Marko Mikulicic <marko@seul.org> wrote:

> Bart Verwilst wrote:
> > We're working on a graphical installer...
> > I'm planning to make it easier to install than Windows :)
> > Ofcourse this will be optional, and the current install will always be 
> > available, and that's a garantee! :o)
> > 
> > PS: This is a calling to everybody interessed, if you have ideas, drawings 
> > from the layout, you're a talented graphics dude, or something, don't 
> > hesitate to email me directly, we can use some help on this one :)
> 
> What I like from the current handcrafted installation is that
> you see what is going on and you see that the installation is not a 
> magical expert only thing, but just the matter of copying the files
> on a mounted filesystem. I like to install gentoo on machines running
> another distro or another gentoo disk because I can still use the 
> machine and I have a more confortable environment where partitioning the 
> disk etc.
>   I think that there are some tasks which could be useful even for 
> "experts":

Have all the commands and their output sent to a file so you can do a
tail -f on it from another console or examine it in more detail if
anything goes wrong.

>   1) aided partitioning. I thought of having a file describing the 
> partition structure (proplist, xml, whatever is easy to write and 
> process with a (python?) script) fstypes and mount points.
>    Then a script would take this file and make the partitions, create
> the filesystems, and output a fstab, to be copied in the newly created etc.
>   I like to think of it as a text file, but it would be nice if
> the optional graphical installation could share the same format for
> storing user configuration, before doing the job, so that users
> can decide which parts of the graphical installation are useful (or just
> doing all auto if he wishes).
>   I wanting to help writing this one, if you need help.

If you are doing this make it a format easy to write by hand. Possible
the same as the fstab format with the required partition size added to
the end of the line with 0 meaning the rest of the disk.
 
> 2) device probing. I think it should be good if the graphical install
> (better than windows :-) would well divided from the logic that does
> device autodetection, so that users which doesn't want gfx install can
> also benefit from its detections. For example, once I needed to 
> configure a asus ISDN card but I didn't know that asus was only the name 
> on the box, and the cards was totaly incompatible with asus driver.
>   Mandrake probed the device and configured correctly (or at least told
> me the chipset) (btw. lspci -> unknown).

<snip>

Use the hotplug scripts to find the kernel modules required? After all,
why have yet another list of how to identify each card.

-- 
Mark Gordon