Hi All, As others, I did not read the thread in its entirety, but I feel a need to add a few points. I was in a few parties in the almost 3 years I work here, so I have some experience. I can tell you that a lot of time is spent on: Defragging, Repartitioning, copying the packages to disk. It's true that a considerable amount of time is spent on actually tuning/solving problems/etc., but I personally would like to minimize the first part as much as possible. Also, the audience is pretty much uniform (as opposed to the hypothetical varied audience of any general-purpose distro): A student, with a decent machine, with Windows installed, who also wants Linux, mainly to do homework, maybe also to learn, but which is not going to be his primary OS any time soon. If/When they decide to take Linux seriously, they will install again (probably a different/newer distro). I tend to think that it's not that far from the average audience in any Israeli instaparty. Also, I would personally want to not install a loader (lilo/grub) on their MBR, so that changing something in Windows, or OTOH completely deleting Linux won't make the machine unbootable.
What I thought of is this: Prepare such an installed system, that others here talk about (and I might help with it, or rather be helped :-) ), with whatever I think and know that's important/useful for my audience (mainly a decent development environment), put it on a CD (hopefully one), let them burn it (or borrow), and copy it at home to their Windows. This image will be a loop-mounted root FS, not a new partition - as I said, this will save a lot of time, with a not-too-big reduction in performance. Then, when the already-installed loop rootfs is on the disk, they will come to the party. There, I (and the other installers) will conf/tune it for the hardware. About booting - there is a patch to grub that makes it bootable from within ntldr/boot.ini. I tried it, and it doesn't work for me, but I think that's the way to go, and intend to help debug it. All of us know that for Win9x there is loadlin. I think there is even a grub.exe (never seen one, though). As I said, this is not intended to be the last install for good. I do expect the interested users to learn it for a few months, then install a real installation (and wipe out Windows :-) ). To reply to some of your specific points (which actually triggered me to write this all): 1. configuring X shouldn't be that hard. Usually there is a simple way to run the very same program the distro runs during the install for this. Even if not, I would rather let them work with something partially working (e.g. the vesa or fbdev drivers), than waste a lot of time on unrelated things. 2. Discussed above. 3. It's quite easy to write some script that will automatically mount all the fat/ntfs partitions without looking at fstab. E.g. knoppix even adds icons for them to KDE. Sadly, I used HPUX very little, very old versions (7 and 8, I think), and did not work with the nice features you talk about. Chosen distro - I of course only talk about ourselves (tau) - we work with RedHat for several years, and while not being perfect in every respect (and not my personal favourite, which is Debian), it's good enough, and it seems we will stay with it for now. Both for our uses and in instaparties. -- Didi On Tue, Aug 26, 2003 at 12:42:40PM +0300, Oron Peled wrote: > On Tuesday 26 August 2003 11:11, Eli Billauer wrote: > > As I mentioned, I'm not talking about adding an rpm or two, but making a > > single computer work really nice, and then duplicate it. > > Basically, that is what all installation kits are striving for! > The problem is that "image" install is almost never good: > 1. Different hardware (e.g: configuring X11) > 2. Different partitioning. I've read your post and know that you > talked about manual partitioning, but this is one of the things > that the installer has to do per-computer! > 3. A complication of (2.) is that the typical installee, already has > a "sacred" windows install -- Need to partition for him, then > edit his fstab to mount the win* partition. Most installers already > have facilities for this. > > BTW: The best solution I've seen so far in the industry to the problem of > "redployable-image" is the HPUX install system. You can create a > "golden-image" of a working system (therebye assuring all dependencies > are good). However, during later install, you may install it on different > hardware (with some limitations), totaly change partitioning, host, > timezone etc. (golden-image installs are of course much faster than > normal installs and by default require no human intervention). > > What is possible I think is: > 1. Place an NFS/HTTP/FTP install trees so people who have network > cards can install through the network and don't wait for CD's. > (This is in *addition* for the normal CD method!) > 2. Place on the same server a set of RPMS/SRPMS for Israeli/Hebrew > software. E.g: latest culmus, fribidi, bidiv, hspell, etc. > This should be done/checked against the chosen distro. > > Last, but not least: What is the chosen distro? I failed to reach the meeting > but would like to help if I can. > > -- > Oron Peled Voice/Fax: +972-4-8228492 > [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.actcom.co.il/~oron > > The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck is probably the day > they start making vacuum cleaners - Ernst Jan Plugge > > > ================================================================= > 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] ================================================================= 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]
