Re: [mingp@COREL.CA: How we can with your Setup Engine?]
[ Ben already commented on the UI stuff... ]
>>>>> "Ming" == Ming Poon <mingp@corel.ca> writes:
> Adam Di Carlo writes:
>> * insert a module * run a script which tests whether the module was
>> "sucessful" (i.e., the blogic card modules when successfully
>> installed will add new devices to /proc/BusLogic/<number> * based
>> on that, either leave the module loaded and mark the module as to
>> be loaded, or unload it
Ming> Sure. We can even narrow the search down in some cases by
Ming> looking for strings and some special signatures in memory. One
Ming> of my new guys has quite a bit of experience in this area. I
Ming> guess I will have him to start studying the current Debian
Ming> install process to get a better understanding of everything. We
Ming> will then try to merge his knowledge, your team's knowledge, and
Ming> Gary's knowledge on the Red Hat install to create a really
Ming> powerful setup engine with as much hardware detection as
Ming> possible.
Yes, sounds like a good plan. I hope we can involve the Free Software
and Linux community at large -- this will enable us, given a solid
infrastructure, to have much larger coverage than we otherwise would
have had.
Ming> With the current Debian 2.1 install, out of the 20
Ming> people who tried it here, only 3 was successful in the past
Ming> week.
I'm shocked to see your sucess rate so low. I hear of many problems
with the Adaptec drivers, but from all other indications, many of the
historically difficult installation options (laptops, esp.) are quite
easily installed using the slink disks (2.1.9 or better).
>> The other reason why an X11 dbootstrap would be hard is that we
>> *assume* that the rescue disk and drivers disk are 1440KB. I think
>> it's a problem that the system isn't more flexible about the rescue
>> disk image size (i.e., possibly making CD or OS booting easier).
>> Anyhow, I guess you guys are basically tossing floppy installation?
Ming> We still would like to support the floppy+CD combination
Ming> installation option. Our goals are to try to bring Linux forward
Ming> to the mass users and to create an easy-to-use, level playing
Ming> platform so all competitions are done in a fair manner (unlike
Ming> MS today). I don't think a plain floppy installation is that
Ming> much suitable these days. (Remember, how painful it was to
Ming> install OS/2 with floppies?). Please see my previous points on
Ming> FB too.
Well, as I said, we should be able to design a system which works with
floppies as well as more full-featured options (and larger root file
systems) given other installation options (NFS root, CD-ROM, OS level
loader, base disk). My model here for a good system (with
autodetection) is the Solaris/x86 stuff. You might check that out, if
you have a copy of Solaris x86 lying around. BTW, Solaris x86 last I
tried (around SunOS 2.5.1, I think) could boot from floppy.
The reason it's required to retain the floppy option is that some
people have really old hardware and we don't want to alienate those
users. However, we might not be able to offer them all the snazzy
options.
Ming> I think once we have a chance to study your setup source code,
Ming> things will become much clearer for us. We can then suggest to
Ming> you which area we can contribute to the most. We would still
Ming> welcome a To-Do list from you so we can pick out the things we
Ming> are good at for the moment or try to hunt for potential
Ming> candidates who are good at those areas.
There is a TODO on the top level of the CVS tree. Work has already
started on the potato disks. If you give us a few days, we can rig
the cvs area so that you can check out files (and even have write
perms, should you want them). Right now, you need to be an official
debian maintainer to have write permissions, but as I said, that
should be fixed in a few days.
--
.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
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