Re: Debian installer questions...

On Tue, Jul 22, 2003 at 07:05:00PM -0400, Tom von Schwerdtner wrote:
> Greetings all,
> 
>     On the topic of a Debian installer....
> 
>     1) I understand there used to be one...what happend to it?
 
There used to be 2, one utterly undocumented.

In the 1.618 they no longer work because the debian world has moved too
far away from what they expect to see.  Slink is only available from the
more ancient archives, and woody is drastically different from what it
saw as testing at the time, even for base.

In the new one we had several plans for doing something that would
survive the test of time ... well, at least until that debian flavor was
moved to the ancient archives.  Storing a base tarball on the 2.x
plastic is out of the question - for that much space, we could ship
mozilla as our web browser.

>     2) Ideas for a new installer?
> 
>         a) Anyone looked at using debchroot?  
>             I've installed a number of debian systems with it and it works
>             quite well (seems perfect for the task).
 
The checklist of hard parts in an installer.
  1. partitioning.  don't forget a swap.
     ...the model of "you should do this part yourself" is very geeky,
     but it doesn't work for everyone.
  2. snarfing the kernel you're currently booted from and putting it in.
     ...this turns out to be *really* hard - the lnx-bbc's initrd is 
     wired up for seeking out the cdrom and mounting a cloop.
  3. dumping bits in.  whose bits, from where?
     ...in our case we can't be lazy like knoppix and just dump
     ourselves in, sicne it wouldn't be debian.  Though it would be 
     Linux.
  4. setting new root user, net setup, and other "firstboot" actions.

The concept appears to be that we'll create a garpkg for it - thus
anyone with a 2.x bbc should be able to download it at will - but we've
all been bogged with other things which seem to have priority.  

I'm vaguely tempted to steal some logic from knoppix' knx-hdinstall now
that it's seen a little debugging, where the baseline for what gets
dumped in is from Sneakum's chroot build environment.

We welcome new developers to the team, so if you'd like to package
debchroot for the GAR tree, let us know when you've got something that
builds locally, and one of the committers could graft it in.

  . | .   Heather Stern                  |         [email protected]
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