Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Hamish Greig <hgreig AT bigpond.net.au>]

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On Tue, 30 Mar 2004 17:23, Wolfgang Scheicher wrote:
> Am Dienstag, 30. März 2004 03:58 schrieb Hamish Greig:
> > Using the individual cache files to install has brought a question into
> > my mind.
> > Shouldn't the actual transfer to hard-disk be done after configuring
> > everything ? [...]
>
> for stuff that takes long it would be good to ask questions first, and do
> stuff next.

 I am getting quite practised now so selecting the options only takes a few 
minutes. 
What takes the longest time is installing the spells/caches.
The post-install section, used to take a long time also, with casting LOGGER 
and the other stuff but now installing metalog (and pcre) only takes 30 
seconds on my pII 300 test machine instead of five minutes.
Thats why I think all the configuring should be done first. The transfer used 
to be the midpoint of the install, but it can now be the end point.

>
> But let me think out loud:
>
> 1) partitioning, formating, mounting
> this needs to be step by step and interactive anyway...

isn't it currently like this?

>
> 2) installing
> the must-have parts can actually be started immediately i think.
> adding a small editor or something needed for network afterwards won't mean
> having to wait long.
> ( if you feel like doing a really sophisticated solution, you could allow
> the user to select the optional parts while still extrackting the others
> :-)

If we were installing 300 spells, an entire kde or gnome desktop, then 
running 
things parallel in the background would be worthwhile,  there are only about 
80-90 spells in 70-80 MB of cache files so there is no need to over 
complicate things like this. 

> 3) doing the post-install-configuration
> can't be done earlier

There should be little post-install-configuration, currently there is only a 
need to choose which of the services to start at boot.
All the things currently done after the transfer stage will be done before 
transfer. 

> 4) chroot into for compiling
> ( is this actually needed, or can be rebooted at this point allready? )
> sorcery should handle everything here, right?

only kernel compilation need be done after the actual install, if the user 
selected to compile the kernel (not copy). NO other compilation is needed, 
all the optional spells are cached.
I haven't added gcc to the iso_root because a working gcc environment puts 
the 
size over 300MB.
Perhaps someone later will make a truly live cd and be able to install by 
compilation with sorcery's CROSS_INSTALL, but it isn't my immediate goal.

> I think all this doesn't leave much choice, or am i missing something?
>
> Worf

not much choice ? 
I don't understand what you mean ?
The previous ISO's had 80+ spells in a single tarball, there was no choice 
about what got installed and how long it took. 
It is now possible to install a working compilation environment in ~20 
minutes 
with only ~50 spells, and others are optionally installed if the user selects 
them. 
/etc, /var/log /var/lib/nfs and /root/ are writable so networking can be 
simply started, the entire cd can be exported over nfs for network installs, 
services (portmap, sshd, xinetd, nfs, pcmcia network, adsl, ppp ) can be run 
and extra kernel sources downloaded if wanted. 

I thought all this was adding features and choices ? ?

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