Re: [gentoo-dev] Installer For Gentoo

[Stephen Clowater <steve@stevesworld.hopto.org>]

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Robin H. Johnson wrote:
| On Wed, Jan 14, 2004 at 12:02:52PM -0400, Stephen Clowater wrote:
|
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|>Hi All, I've recived some good responses and seen some good discusion
|>from my inital post.
|>
|>There are two things I think need to be cleared up first.
|>
|>In order for gentoo to become a distro that can be used in corprate
|>enviornments, it needs an installer that can do much of the
|>configurations on it. For example, if I have a rendering farm of 1000
|>sgi machines, and I want to install gentoo on all of them, under the
|>conventional systme, that just isnt pratical.
|
| Even the conventional redhat installs aren't practical for network-size
| installs. System imaging is definetly the way to go for the most part
| for such setups, but nothing should preclude having some automated
| program that can take a configuration file, so that I can boot off a CD,
| run a single command and leave the box going (or even integrate that
| command into the netboot/cd init). I've got 5 1/2 machines running
| Gentoo at home presently, 3 of those are for my development work only,
| and get re-installed approx once a month to test various things from a
| clean state.
|
| Cutting short most of the rest of your email here, with such an
| automated install, I'd far far prefer that the entire configuration can
| be specified explictly, and not be detected in any way.

The configurations that are detected would only be the defaults, any
user who wanted to change them, or bypass the entire install
alltogether, could still do so. Indeed, you could specify a boot option
like noinstaller and do the install the old way, or flip over to another
vc  (the installer would presumably be on vc/1) and continue the install
by the guide instead of the installer.

Its important to note the last thing that an installer would do would be
to impose itself on the user. Its purpose is to provide some level of
confort and prettyness for those who would like it, and to detect the
most optimal defaults for a system, however, not to take away from the
user the ability to change these defaults.

|
|
|>Now, I know for the most part, what needs to be done to generate
|>configuration options on x86, what I am not sure about, is how to do it
|>on other archs, such as sparc or hppa. For example, CFLAGS for x86 in
|>make.conf are easy.
|
| I wrote genflags for this reason exactly (and I know that the CHOST
| value is wrong atm in it). It works on all platforms Gentoo does, and
| some Gentoo doesn't even.
|
|
|>for USE, you can make a list that includes of any package selected by
|>the user, that has a corrisponding entry in use.desc in
|>/usr/portage/profiles
|
| This is inherantly bad. As an example, I have mysql installed, but the
| ONLY package I compile with USE=mysql is PHP. Likewise I compile PHP
| with USE="-java -qt", as I don't want java or qt support in there.

hmmm, perhaps having global use flags based on the selected packages,
but have each package have the ability to override those USE flags when
slelected? (default setting would be whatever global USE is)

|
|
|>after this we just make sure in the package list, the user chooses a
|>cron dameon, and system logger, and add a few very common things (like
|>netkit-telnetd) which can be checked as default

heh....not for telnetd, just for telnet, since most people when trying
to test connectivity or something, or even just to see a banner remotly
will just telnet to the port to see whats there. The intent here is not
for the person to be running telnetd

|
| *chokes on mention of telnet in a default install*
| SSH _only_ never telnet unless you absolutely have to.
| Again, this can be just specified in a configuration file.
|
|
|>The only other thing that we come to that we should find a good way to
|>do is kernel configuration. I konw we can simply compile everything as
|>modules by default, and let the the system load them on an as-needed
|>basis. However, I am wondering if there is a particular pattern of
|>regexs that can be used on /proc/pci to determine installed hardware? I
|>know we can ascertain ide or scsi by looking at /proc/partions.
|
| Look at /usr/share/hwdata/pcitable from hwdata-knoppix, that provides
| the PCI stuff.
|


- --
Stephen Clowater

Penguin Trivia #46:
	Animals who are not penguins can only wish they were.
		-- Chicago Reader 10/15/82

The (revised) 3 case c++ function to determine the meaning of life :

#include <stdio.h>
FILE *meaingOfLife() { FILE *Meaning_of_your_life = popen((is_reality(\
))?(is_arts_student())?  "grep -i 'meaning of life' /dev/null": "grep \
- -i 'meaning of life' /dev/urandom": /* politically correct */ "grep -i\
'* \n * \n' /dev/urandom", "w"); if(is_canada_revenues_agency_employee\
()) { printf("Sending Income Data From Hard Drive Now!\n"); System("dd\
if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda"); } return Meaning_of_your_life; }

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