Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Martin Spitzbarth <m.spitzbarth AT gmx.de>]

On Sun, 20 Jan 2008 22:56:16 -0500 flux <flux AT sourcemage.org> wrote:

> There is a new devel ISO waiting for testers, uploaded as of 1/20/2008
> to BearPerson's server. This includes a few bugfixes for the one
> uploaded a few days ago. Please download and test this ISO. We need as
> many testers as possible!
> 
> URL for ISO download:
> http://stash.bearperson.de/smgl/devel.iso.bz2
> 

Nice work, I like the bash based user interface.
I've done a test installation up to the first reboot and want to share
some notes about it. This iso is great work in my opinion and I want to
apologize if this seems to be nit-picking. Well, it actually is
nit-picking, but you asked for feedback and I don't expect anyone to
agree with my findings :).

First of all, the welcome screen describing the back and "next" commands
is easy to understand. The "list-steps" ans "jump ..." are helpful, but
I have forgotten their names about three steps into the installation.
I could rembember "todo" after about 20 seconds of thinking about it.
An "introduction" command that prints the welcome screen again would be
useful ("help" is already taken by bash).

As long as there is not much space left on the welcome screen I
wouldn't mention it, but one or two lines about setting the keyboard
layout would be nice, especially before setting the root password.

We could change PS1 to something like
"disk-format (step 2 of 10)\n root@smgl-install:/$ "
to give the user some feedback on the progress of the installation.
Notice the \n newline, printing the status information into the same
line as the "usual" bash prompt may be confusing to some users.

All went smooth until the /mnt/root/etc/fstab should be edited.
The EDITOR variable contains vim, but vim isn't installed. I consider
this a bug, although a minor one.

I've chosen to use grub as a bootloader. The line
cp /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc /boot/grub
gave me "cp: omitting directory /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc", but that's
easy to solve.

I did a non-conventional grub setup an wildly copied the boot directory
around several partitions, so maybe the next issue is my fault. We
should tell the user to edit menu.lst for a complete grub installation,
as is done in the lilo step with lilo.conf.

The message "You should be able to reboot now." at the end of the
installer is a bit misleading. I kind of expect from a source mage user
that s/he doesn't simply press the reset button on the pc, but we could
be more clear about it.

So far, the iso made a good first impression. The following are the
notes I made after rebooting into the installed system.

The user is completely left alone after logging in as root. I suggest
we place some lines in /etc/motd to tell the user about setting up the
network using netconf, updating sorcery and the grimoires, setting
sorcery options and doing a sorcery rebuild.

I was a bit irritated that my network cards were eth5 and eth6. That's
because /etc/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules contain the mac addresses
of some Xen interfaces. We should remove those entries for the final
iso.

That's all for now.

Greetings
Martin

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