--- Begin Message ---
- To: adam@onshore.com
- Subject: Re: Corel and Debian (Was: Re: Caldera and Debian?)
- From: Amy Fong <afong@furryterror.org>
- Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1999 23:31:41 -0400 (EDT)
- Message-id: <199906290331.XAA24143@furryterror.org>
> Amy, perhaps you could be so kind as to give us a status update on how
> the work is going? From talking to you guys in April/May, you seemed
> to have very ambitious goals for July (booting into X11, etc). Do
> these goals still seem likely?
>
> How is work progressing? Do you need more review/commentary?
>
> --
> .....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
>
Hi there,
Sorry it took me so long.
Anyways, update. We're now still doing alot of prototyping work and
playing around with different ideas. We definitely have something where
when you boot up, the CD will do a bit of probing and automatically
start up X for you and the mouse is working and all that. Another thing
is that something is being developed so that instead of having a lilo
prompt, you're presented with a graphical selection utility.
Right now we're thinking of skipping the entire rebooting process by
echoing the device number of the "target" hard drive into the real root
device file under /proc/sys/kernel/real_root_dev or whatever the exact
file is.
So currently, the steps involved seems to be something like:
- Having a UI starting up which enables selection of things like hard drive
partitioning option
- UI enables user to select type of packaging option (be it custom or
preselected)
- for the custom, instead of having what dselect currently shovels,
we're breaking things down based on category (ie web, etc)
- When the user chooses start install,
1. hard drives gets partitioned and filesystems gets created
2. a base configure script will run which performs mounting,
extracts the base tarball, etc
3. a program gets called which attempts to do X configuring and
creates the XF86Config file
4. Package fetching and unpacking happens - currently we isolated
some packages which do not prompt the user for options and
just do a configure on those -- done by convincing libapt not to
configure
5. Requested userids gets created
We have a setup library which consists of hard drive partitioning/etc
API plus a packaging manager and a setup manager.
In writing the packaging manager, one of the things I wrote was a
mechanism to enable a user to "deselect" a package and remove all the
packages added due to dependencies which aren't needed anymore. Also,
a function is written which tries to guess all the packages which may be
removed if a certain package is removed (accuracy's been like 85% so
far).
I've been trying to use the Debian cvs repository but unfortunately,
things have been so chaotic lately that it hasn't happened much.
Probably one of the problems I've identified lately is testing. Most of
Corel's systems are all SCSIs, they managed to get a few IDE systems but
still, the amount of testing that we can do is quite limited.
Anyhows, that's a brief overview. If you have any other questions just ask
away.
Amy
--
"We Suzaku Seishi aren't smart enough to give up!!!" Tasuki (Fushigi Yuugi)
I don't speak for anyone but myself.
Amy Fong (afong@furryterror.org)
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