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Re: Apropos README-OVERVIEW



> Marcin Owsiany <porridge@pandora.info.bielsko.pl> writes:
> 
> > I mean a situation where LILO is set up wrong, not hardware failures
> > or something. Since LILO installation is a critical part of every
> > setup, especially when you don't make a floppy as well. IF one sets
> > up LILO wrong for any reason (be it his/her lack of knowledge, of
> > English, of his hardware (the famous 1023 cyls. "feature")), he/she
> > _HAS TO REPEAT EVERYTHING_ up to the installation of LILO.
> 
> > And it is not just a hypothesis, i had such problem once.
> 
> Why?  Couldn't you just boot from the rescue disk in 'rescue' mode and
> recover this way?  I have fixed broken lilo.confs this way many
> times...
> 
> I agree with you that I would not *at* *this* *point* make "rebootless
> installation" the default, but i think it's a really nice sexy option
> which we should allow as an option as soon as it is feasible.

A rebootless installation should work on 95% of the cases and is a really
cool feature, so why not have it as default and leave the real reboot as
an option for the other 5% of the cases. I found problems only with mixed
ide+scsi configurations, which are not a very common situation.

> > > Note also that the reboot is not really needed, as you can do all the rest
> > > of the installation by restarting the new init from chroot in the target
> > > root.
> > 
> > that's interesting, i think i'll try that myself next time.

If you are interested I have a patch for the old slink busybox. As it is only
a few lines of code it should be easily portable to the new busybox.

> Yup yup yup -- wouldn't rebootless installation rock the world?  I
> just installed Win98/vmware last week and I swear it musta rebooted 8
> times all told (after getting video drivers, network, and all that
> setup).

That's why I prefer automatic installers...

> > However it is only possible to do such things if you know something about
> > the system. And please believe me: it is a shock for a newbie (especially
> > windoze-converted one) to install a boot loader - i know of lots of people
> > who load Linux from a floppy only because they are scared to install LILO.

The bootfloppy option should always be recommended to a newbie, at least as
a backup of a broken lilo config. A good option is also a lilo or syslinux
on a standalone floppy.

-- 
Massimo Dal Zotto

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