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  • From: "Wyatt Draggoo" <wyatt AT draggoo.com>
  • To: sm-sorcery AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [SM-Sorcery] Recent Install Experiences...
  • Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2003 11:31:22 -0800 (PST)

First off, let me say that compared to previous ISOs, installing with 0.7.1
has been *great*! Nearly everything compiled without problems, and setting
everything up was generally a breeze. A few comments now:

1. The ISO:

There are two things I'd like two see included on the ISO. The first is
bc---this is one of those tools that I think should always "be there" in a
distro, and one I use all the time, like sed and awk.

The second is wireless_tools (I can't remember if it's a dash or an
underscore...). It's a little annoying to have to bring my wireless sytems
up to my wiring closet after an install to cast this so I can use my
wireless card with WEP, etc. It would be even nicer if the questions like
ESID and wireless keys would be included and set up during the install, but
I could live with doing it manually as long as the tools were available.

One other nice addition to the installer would be to be able to undo/redo
actions. An excellent example is that I accidentally created and mounted
my /boot partition as xfs, and there was no way to undo that change. I had
to shell out, unmount the partition, recreate the filesystem, remount it
correctly, and then shell out at the end of the install to fix the fstab
before I rebooted.

2. Setup

Can we get the X11 font directories set up automatically in
/etc/fonts/local.fonts (I think that's the file, off the top of my head)?
It took me a while to figure out that was the reason Mozilla Firebird
wasn't coming up, and I don't remember having to add these manually in
previous installs.

Second, the devices in /etc/securetty are still listed under /devices, not
/dev. This caused me some alarm, as I wasn't able to log in as root after
I cast Linux-PAM. The first time this happened I thought I had
fat-fingured the root password both times, booted from a rescue disc,
changed the password, rebooted and it *still* didn't work. So I figured
I'd mangled something and started over with the install. When it happened
the second time I decided something else had happened and eventually came
to the securetty file.

Last, I've never really read the Wiki on installs, and was browsing around
the other day. I found out about compiling gcc (I'd been doing that),
perl, gettext and glibc before doing the sorcery rebuild (hadn't been doing
those). I'm betting few people are going to read the Wiki before their
first install, and am wondering if there is a way to add notes like this to
the boot after the install, such as putting it in an motd, or root's
.bashrc file (have .bashrc, with the message, and a .bashrc-normal, which
gets copied over the first .bashrc after the the first login or something).
Just a couple of paragraphs saying they should cast these things, do their
updates, do the rebuild, etc. I think that would go a long way to making
the install a little smoother.

Wyatt

Overall, excellent job guys!

--
Wyatt Draggoo



  • [SM-Sorcery] Recent Install Experiences..., Wyatt Draggoo, 11/20/2003

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