Public SourceMage Discussion List

[David Kowis <dkowis AT shlrm.org>]

Quoting flux <flux AT sourcemage.org>:
> > 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).
>
> 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! :)

Override help so it displays what we want. A simple message with a way  
to get back at the builtin help would be sufficient.

> > 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.
>
> Noted. This is being worked on.
>
> > 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.
>
> I like this idea! It's a nice simple solution. In fact, while we're at
> it something like "$CURSTEP ($X of $TOTAL)  type commands for a list of
> commandsn root@smgl-install:$PWD #" would be even better! Then we don't
> need to worry about the user remembering what they need to type to see a
> list of commands, because it will be printed at each prompt for them,
> and this would only take up 1 extra line of screen real-estate, which I
> don't think is a problem. Thanks for the suggestion!

Yeah that's a good idea. Perhaps even a current step/next step type thing.
I'd like to see that, rather than step 4 of 6. It'd be better to see  
something like:
Current: partition-disks Next: format-disks$/root
The username and hostname aren't really even necessary in this simple  
install CD.
> > 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.
>
> Noted.
If it's saying "you should be able to reboot now" Then I'd assume all  
the disks are unmounted. If that's done, then you really can reboot  
now. Might mention ejecting the CD, but most people are smart enough  
to realize that.

> > 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 mentioned a onetime run script with a README file in /root
It'd run the first time root logs in. Display that there's a README  
file (or maybe less the README for them, but that's kinda annoying)

> > 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.

That's due to cruft building up in our chroot building process. We're  
not cleaning up after ourselves well enough when we're building our  
stable chroots. The stable-basesystem-0.16 tarball is actually missing  
shadow! And it's got the Xen interfaces in there, which shouldn't be  
there as well.

lessee if horde can generate a valid pgp signature today...


--
David Kowis
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