Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Remko van der Vossen <wich AT stack.nl>]

On Mon, Jan 21, 2008 at 11:04:48AM -0500, flux wrote:
> You are not alone in having this problem. Others have reported the same
> issue. I had already renamed "list-steps" to "steps" in development to
> try and make it easier to remember, but definitely we need some
> help-listing command. I'm not sure it should be called though, as
> "introduction" seems counter-intuitive, as do the names I can think up
> at present. The best would of course be help, which is taken. Something
> like "commands" maybe? Can I get a consensus from the list here as to
> what the best name would be? The vote is on! :)

As Jaka said, why not just override help? If we don't want that how
about just '?', akin to many in-program prompt help functions.

> > 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.
> 
> That shouldn't be. We don't have vim on the ISO, but instead have elvis,
> which is linked to vi. I'll investigate how EDITOR got set, as it should
> not have.

Why not just include vim on the iso, if you build it with a minimal
feature set and minimal dependencies it won't be that big and at least
those who are used to vim (which are many) will have a decent editor.

I presume emacs is not included either. I have no personal experience
with emacs, but is it possible to build emacs with a minimal feature set
and minimal dependencies?

> > 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.
> 
> We're working on this. There's some concern over what exactly would be
> the best way to handle this. It will be resolved for stable though.

I feel /etc/motd would be the best way, most of the linux and unix
installers that provide a minimal installation give you an motd with
minimal instructions on how to proceed, and optionally reference a man
page with further documentation.

Maybe we could make such a man page with the basics on setting up the
system, adding users, i.e. network setup, sorcery updating and sorcery
rebuilding, security tightening, configuring services, etc. and direct
them to the website for futher information.

OpenBSD has a nice manpage for this which is called afterboot, maybe we
can get some good ideas for a manpage of our own there.

> > 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.
> 
> Ah! I will now hunt this down and kill it with prejudice! I don't know
> how this got in the ISO though. I don't have Xen.

Was the iso perhaps based on the chroot that we provide? I noticed that
there were Xen network rules in there when I used the chroot to set up a
machine. Anyway, just a matter of clearing out those lines from the
persistent rules file, maybe you should check the persistent storage
rules as well.

Regards, Remko.

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