On Sat, Nov 09, 2002 at 03:35:51PM +0200, Yedidyah Bar-David wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I started to write, mainly for myself, some notes about the instaparty
> we had on Thursday.
> Basically, I think the whole notion should be very different from
> today, and that the usuall installers (well, at least RH) are too
> general to be close-to-optimal for our (tau's) audience (and probably
> also most of the potential Israeli audience).
>
> I will use these notes mostly to prepare for our next instaparty,
> but I think many of the issues are also relevant to other instaparties.
>
> You can find the (on-going-version of the) notes here:
> <http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~didi/instaparty-notes>
>
> I will be happy to get comments.
>
> Didi
>
At first let me say that giving every new instalee a CD set is desired.
Now once you are going this way you will probably installed from this
set because it might be easier for you.
If I has managed to grasped what was going in the BIU party I took part
several years ago, they contacted a commercial CD manufacture who was
selling a CD set for 25 NIS for students who asked for it. Then the
students took their new set to the install person who installed Linux on
their machine. I believe a student could get without buying a set but
most students did buy it. I don't know what sort of arrangement did the
BIU had with that manufacture but there was no CD problem and although
the man was left with CD sets I believe he did smile.
On the other hand, it seems that the last 3 installation parties
(Ra'ananin, Technion and TAU) had a CD problem of some degree. There
fore it is probably a fact of life that you can not always have what
is desirable. This is why the network option should be considered.
For the rest of this message my Debian glasses will probably be more
noticeable as this is the only distribution I am familiar with. I guess
that many other popular distributions have the same tools. Am I wrong?
1. I don't know about PQmagic but I believe parted should be the
software of choice when it comes to partitions matters.
2. Install from net: the way to go if possible. As for how to do it,
following Debian's old way the problem should be divided into booting
into Linux and carrying on from there. As for booting into Linux,
preparing the equivalent of the boot floppy by yourself is not
something you want to get into, or so I believe. There fore, the only
way if the net option is essential seems to me using the official set
and loadlin it. Since I don't have any experience with that, not even
with Debian, I can't say more. Now once you were booted into the
installation software, you might prepare a repository of the packages
you want to install and install it, just like apt-get does. I am not
sure it worth the trouble in order not to use the official ones but
it is doable. You can NFS mount your repository, or prepare a
dedicated http server for it. I guess you would include a boot loader
as one of the packages - I didn't understand your `how to boot
question'.
I also didn't understand your suggestion about having your own ide
disk. Are you suggesting to open the case, plug another disk and
install from there?
3. As for knoppix, the only few things I have heard about it are that it
is based on Debian and have a very good automated hardware detection
facilties. These facilities sounds great for an installation party.
However isn't being basically a Debian distribution doesn't mean
lagging behind as far as KDE+GNOME desk top environments are
concerned?
The
--
Shaul Karl, [EMAIL PROTECTED] e t
=================================================================
To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with
the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command
echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
