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

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

[D. Carrico]

Gentoo,

I love your distribution, but can you get the install down to at least a
couple of scripts?


Regards,

Don Carrico

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

[Troy Dack]

----- Original Message -----
From: "D. Carrico" <dcarrico@verizon.net>
To: <gentoo-dev@gentoo.org>
Sent: Saturday, July 20, 2002 5:14 PM
Subject: [gentoo-dev] I am not a touch typest. Wish I were.


> Gentoo,
>
> I love your distribution, but can you get the install down to at least a
> couple of scripts?
>

Don,
    You won't like this answer ....

Hopefully not!

Gentoo is not meant to be a point & click or type "go" to install type of
distribution.  The beauty and power of linux lies in the fact that there are
distributions available that cater to everyone's taste.

If you would like an install of Gentoo that only requires running a couple
of scripts, then write them yourself and submit them through
bugs.gentoo.org.  I'm sure there are others who would find them helpful.

--
    Troy

Children seldom misquote you. In fact, they usually
repeat word for word what you shouldn't have said.

http://linuxserver.tkdack.com
http://gentoo.tkdack.com

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

[Bart Verwilst]

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 :)

Thanks!


On Saturday 20 July 2002 13:26, Troy Dack wrote:
|| ----- Original Message -----
|| From: "D. Carrico" <dcarrico@verizon.net>
|| To: <gentoo-dev@gentoo.org>
|| Sent: Saturday, July 20, 2002 5:14 PM
|| Subject: [gentoo-dev] I am not a touch typest. Wish I were.
||
|| > Gentoo,
|| >
|| > I love your distribution, but can you get the install down to at least a
|| > couple of scripts?
||
|| Don,
||     You won't like this answer ....
||
|| Hopefully not!
||
|| Gentoo is not meant to be a point & click or type "go" to install type of
|| distribution.  The beauty and power of linux lies in the fact that there
|| are distributions available that cater to everyone's taste.
||
|| If you would like an install of Gentoo that only requires running a couple
|| of scripts, then write them yourself and submit them through
|| bugs.gentoo.org.  I'm sure there are others who would find them helpful.
||
|| --
||     Troy
||
|| Children seldom misquote you. In fact, they usually
|| repeat word for word what you shouldn't have said.
||
|| http://linuxserver.tkdack.com
|| http://gentoo.tkdack.com
||
||
||
|| _______________________________________________
|| gentoo-dev mailing list
|| gentoo-dev@gentoo.org
|| http://lists.gentoo.org/mailman/listinfo/gentoo-dev

-- 
Bart Verwilst
Gentoo Linux Developer, Release Coordinator
Gent, Belgium

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

[Marko Mikulicic]

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":

  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.

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).

3) a use flag browser. It was confusing for me at first, and still it 
is, to see many use flags in /etc/make.globals and having to see what is
in and what I should add, and what is available. I'd like to have a use
flag list and some simple way of activating/deactivating which will 
output /etc/make.conf.

I would find these things useful to save time and typing, retaining all
the power of gentoo installation.

I'd like that any work done in the graphical install could be reused
separately to provide a custom installation method, if wanted.
  I mean, someone could build on top of it a complete graphical install,
someone could only use a minimal ncurses based filesystem configuration 
tool... but without duplicating code.

What do you think?

If, eventually, the "config" files where expressed in xml, what is
the littles packet for xml handling that wound fit in the installation 
environment. I heard that tinyqt will be used for portage2, and it has
a xml parser, but it would be nice to write it in a scripting language 
(python?). I'm not a python guru. I wrote some little xml handling 
script but I don't know which parser is better to use.
Any ideas ?

Marko Mikulicic

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

[Mark Gordon]

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