unitedlinux news conference

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, Sep 18, 2002 at 02:48:40PM -0400, dep wrote:
>begin  Federico Voges's  quote:
>
>| Besides that, I really like Lizard because you can start the
>| install, set all the configuration options and leave the
>| installation running. When you came back, you have the system
>| installed. You don't have to stay arround answering questions every
>| three install steps (and wait for reboots, etc).
>
>to their credit -- and i hate and despise yast2 -- they've done a lot 
>of work on it such that it's a *little* less intrusive in screwing 
>around with user settings, and they do let you walk away and let it 
>install. (an exception here is when you're prompted to change cds, 
>which isn't an issue with an ftp install from their site.) they have 
>apparently rejiggered package management for 8.1 as well; i pretty 
>much assume that this will be part of the ul distro, in that the 
>whole distro will be suse.
>
>if they are in fact seeking the enterprise (and in that they've said 
>things to piss off everybody else, one supposes that they are), they 
>will need to be a little less cute with the ul tools than they have 
>been in the more amorphous distributions. i am absolutely certain 
>that they know this.

They've certainly heard it enough times, but I don't think it's sinking in.

The install procedure I want to see is simple, will install with ANY
graphics adapter and CPU (not requiring PIII or whatever), will do NFS
installs on arbitrary servers and directories, and will accept a list of
packages for custom installations on floppy or other easily specified
media.  Caldera's OpenLinux 1.3 was the last installation that allowed all
these things.

Caldera's Lizard installs too frequently hang on the graphics adapters, and
their NFS installation procedures are a total kludge requiring proper
configuration of the server's DHCP server to specify installation
directories.  Lizard lost the custom install list feature after
eDesktop 2.4, and the Caldera server 3.x won't install on anything less
than a PIII.

An installation procedure needs to:

  1.  Probe hardware to find the disk, NICs, and any other hardware
      essential to the installation.

  2.  Allow the installer to partition the disk(s), and specify the boot
      loader (or no boot loader installed).

  3.  Set network paramters if necessary for NFS install.

  4.  If doing NFS install, specify IP address and directory.

  5.  Select packages or custom package list.

  6.  Make emergency boot disk.

All other configuration can be done after the system is running and
bootable (perhaps even using a serial console).

It would be very beneficial to have the hardware probes done during
installation easily available on the running system, perhaps broken out
into functional groups like NIC, Mouse, Graphics Adapters, SCSI host
adapters, etc. which would make life easier when changing or adding
hardware.

The trend in Linux installation since Caldera introduced Lizard in
OpenLinux 2.2 has been towards something that can be handled by brain-dead
Windows users, and have made life more difficult for those who want to use
Linux in a server environment where the system's never going to run
graphics, or perhaps on older systems that don't have the Latest &
Greatest(tm) CPU or hardware.

Bill
--
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