On Sun, Jun 10, 2001 at 03:30:04PM -0700, Chris Tillman wrote: > Here are some opportunities: > > During Install Operating System and Modules, I chose to install from an > already-mounted (HFS) hard disk filesystem. I mounted it thru the installer, > so it would know about it; but I got an immediate error after selecting that > option, when it would have ordinarily displayed my choices: Directory error; > the supplied directory does not exist, please enter a new one. The next box > allows entry of a path, in which I entered /target/instmnt/, and it went on > from there, finding the path to the system install package OK. (It would be > helpful to note in these manual path-entry boxes that the path must be > relative to / not /target. Or put another way, the path must begin with > /target/ for hard disks. Since stuff gets mounted under /target by the > installer, and it doesn't tell the user that, it's not immediately obvious > that the /target prefix is needed for paths. your supposed to let the installer mount the hard disk partition when you select `install from hard disk partition' when it asks what method you want to use. in that case the partition is mounted on /instmnt where it belongs and is expected. everything mounted under /target will end up in your final /etc/fstab. > The shell on tty2 could have the same intro text as appears when selecting > Execute A Shell. > > In that shell intro text, nano-tiny --help, and a few other places, we refer > to 'nano' rather than 'nano-tiny'. Rather than fix all the different places, > and because it's easier to type, I think we should just add a hard link > named 'nano'. all these references have already been fixed. nano isn't the same as nano-tiny so a hard link is probably not best. > In the shell intro text, we could note that arrow keys don't work, history > is not available, and there is no auto completion; just to remind people > that know and love those shell features (and also so they won't always be > reporting it as a bug). Also, rather than recommending a ls /bin /sbin etc, too bad, those features take up too much space and we are already MAXED OUT. > I think a short help file listing the available commands and what they do in > the installer environment would be extremely helpful for people new to *nix > - but that's the subject of another post. The shell intro text could then > just say, "type 'help' for a list of available commands". that could be useful. > Still on the subject of the shell intro text, it briefly appears on the > console for some reason, after selecting Reboot the computer, but before it > actually reboots. ive noticed that, im not sure why that happens. its really unimportant so who cares. > If we're running low on space, there are a few packages in root.bin that > probably aren't needed for powerpc: lilo, fdisk, cfdisk, mformat. Also lilo is a hard link to lazybox. fdisk, and cfdisk are hardlinks to to the same shell script wrapper, that wrapper decides based on archetecture and subarchetecture what fdisk is the right fdisk. so on powermacs it runs mac-fdisk, on CHRP it runs cfdisk (or something like that). > route, chgrp, rmmod could probably wait to be added during base > installation? I don't know what cardmgr is for. route is needed to configure the network, rmmod really should be there in case the user messes up something with modules. chgrp might be used in dbootstrap im pretty sure at least chown is. all of those are part of busybox anyway, and since we use the main busybox package we get everything it includes. the busybox package is also serving as an emergency tool for system rescue. > One final note, I used mac-fdisk within the installer to split one of my > Linux partitions into two. Nice job on the new partition display, it's very > informative! Since my MacOS partitions are at the end of the disk as > recommended, when I rebooted (without changing yaboot.conf and rerunning > ybin), it looked like I had lost MacOS. Yaboot was trying to load MacOS from > my newly created Linux partition, because adding one in the middle > incremented all the higher partition numbers by one. All I had to do was go > back and fix yaboot.conf, but it made me wonder whether another check could > be done after running mac-fdisk: if the number of partitions changed during > the session, warn that yaboot.conf may need to be changed? The world is full > of dummies like me... but there is no yaboot.conf when the installation starts. about 0.04% of people are actually going to use boot-floppies to do a second install alongside of an already working install unless they know what they are doing. the users who don't know will probably run `Make System Bootable' as well which would have replaced yaboot.conf. i wish you would have tested that step BTW, it works on newworld powermacs now but has been getting zero testing except by me. -- Ethan Benson http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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