Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Eric Sandall <eric AT sandall.us>]

On Thursday 10 April 2008 12:53:24 flux wrote:
> I haven't heard many reports about the most recent devel ISO. This can
> mean either of 2 things: 1) lots of people have tested it, and it "Just
> Works" great, so there's nothing to report/complain about, and we can
> break open the champagne/pink cookies/etc.; 2) very few people have
> tested it, and hence there are very few reports on whether it works.
>
> I'm looking to get a consensus on how many people have actually tested
> the ISO. If you haven't tested it, please do go test it. We can't get to
> stable without testing, and everyone wants to get to stable, right?
> Right? *wink wink nudge nudge*

Justin,

I tested it in one VM via KVM/QEMU and ran into no issues that I recall (or I 
would have reported them ;)). I did try GRUB, as that's what caused me the 
most grief last time, and it worked without issue following the exact 
instructions given. :)

A few notes (which I'm sure you're aware of ;), and I recall you saying the 
first two will be taken care of once the installation process is finished):
* Using the 0.13-5 grimoire. Should be updated to latest stable. :)
* Sorcery is at 1.13.6, but 1.13.8 is the latest stable.
* No optional spells are available. Help says they will be coming soon.
* The default installed /etc/fstab is missing some common entries, such as:
        tmpfs   /var/lock       tmpfs   defaults,size=10m        0 0
        tmpfs   /var/run        tmpfs   defaults,size=10m        0 0
        tmpfs   /tmp            tmpfs   defaults,size=1g,nr_inodes=64m    0 0

        # enable this to get POSIX shared memory support (needed for a few 
apps)
        tmpfs   /dev/shm        tmpfs   defaults,size=2g        0 0

You may want to lower the size= settings for /tmp and /dev/shm for the 
defaults. :) I believe they were "64m" when first installed.

* Information on generation a swapfile would be handy. :) My /etc/fstab from 
yore has:
        # Virtual memory swap file
        #   If you need it then create it with the following commands
        #     dd      if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1M count=1024
        #     mkswap  /swapfile
        #     chmod   000 /swapfile
        #   Then uncomment the line below.
        #/swapfile       none    swap    defaults        0 0

* For boot-loader step, the instructions seem inconsistent (from a new user 
perspective, IMO ;))
"For lilo instructions, type *jump lilo*."
"For grub instructions, just type *next*."

Why is one "jump <bootloader>" and the other "next"? They should both be 
"jump 
<bootloader>" to be consistent, IMO. next/prev (if there is a prev, which 
seems to be "back") are to go to different steps, lilo and grub are sub-
sections of the boot-loader step.

* May want to rename "back" to "prev" to match "next". Or change "next" to 
"forward" to match "back". :)

* When finished, you tell the user to unmount all partitions, but not to run 
swapoff. In the beginning you have them run `swapon <partition>`, but if they 
use a swapfile (like myself) under /mnt/root, they may not remember to run 
`swapoff /mnt/root/.swapfile`.

* You have the users manually unmount each partition, which is probably a 
good 
exercise. :) However, `umount -a` will unmount all partitions listed in 
/etc/mtab unless they are busy (e.g. /dev). So this is a nice shortcut, but 
may confuse the user as they will get an error about /dev being "busy." So 
perhaps manually unmounting each partition is a good idea. ;)

Sorry I didn't send this earlier, GCC 4.3.0 got me distracted. :/

-sandalle

-- 
Eric Sandall                     |  Source Mage GNU/Linux Developer
eric AT sandall.us PGP: 0xA8EFDD61  |  http://www.sourcemage.org/
http://eric.sandall.us/          |  http://counter.li.org/  #196285

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.