Re: Graphical installer

[Michael Cardenas <michaelc@lindows.com>]

On Thu, Oct 24, 2002 at 08:14:25PM +0200, Marek Habersack wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 24, 2002 at 05:31:54PM +0200, Tollef Fog Heen scribbled:
> > * Jo Dillon 
> > 
> > | Hi...I saw today that Debian is working on a new graphical installer,
> > | probably gtkfb based. How wedded are you to that? I'm a former Trolltech
> > | employee and one of the people who wrote Qt/Embedded; I might be interested
> > | in writing/helping to write a Qt/E-based installer, if there's sufficient
> > | interest in that.
> > 
> > We are basing the installer around cdebconf, which can use any
> > frontend: text, slang, gtkfb, corba, whatever.  Somebody just have to
> > write it.  I think having both Qt and gtkfb frontends might be
> > duplication of work, but if you'd like to do that: go ahead.  If it
> > works well, the Qt frontend might be the default.
> I'd like to work on the gtkfb frontend once I'm familiar enough with the
> debian-installer code (I'm in the process of getting acquainted with it
> right now).
> 
> marek

Great! I'm currently working on making a cd with the gtk front end for
testing purposes. I plan on making udebs for gtkfb and its
dependencies, although I'm not sure why Tolleff wants this. 

Does debian-cd know about udebs? If we just need gtkfb on the live
filesystem on the cd, why do we need udebs for them? Is that so that
floppy installs can download the gtkfb udeb and use the gtk frontend?
That seems pretty wild to me. 

Anyway, I found this great intro to gtkfb

http://www.redhat.com/devnet/articles/gtkfb-whitepaper/size.html

and am begninning to work on that. Although, I'm pretty busy at work,
so I won't have tons of time in the next week. 

We need a cd image with gtkfb and the gtk ftonrend as the default for
testing purposes. Aside from "make demo" I don't think that the gtk
frontend has had much testing. 

Also, there were some cosmetic feature requests such as creating a
disabled back button instead of no back button, that I plan to
implement soon. 

Any way you can help would be greatly appreciated, with the cd or
with the frontend code itself. 

thanks

  michael

-- 
michael cardenas       | lead software engineer, lindows.com
hyperpoem.net          | GNU/Linux software developer
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