Hacking an installer for woody?
Howdy,
I'm the lead on a project called Qbalt - it's essentially a GPL
reincarnation of the Cobalt appliances, now EOL'ed by Sun. It's based
on Debian, and is all working well (no release as yet, though).
Currently my work is on the installer. The way installation occurs on
the Cobalt units is quite interesting - as the machines do not have
removable media, installation is done via network. Essentially, you
have a host machine running dhcpd/nfsd, with a /nfsboot-x86 directory
exported, and the Cobalt will boot from this and do its stuff.
I need to look at writing an installer, that can, on choice, do
automated/manual partitioning, install extra .deb's thrown on the CD
(so people can customise installation), and the usual installation
stuff. The less questions, the better, but you get the idea.
Currently the way I'm doing this is by one ugly noninteractive sh
script that just partitions, and uncompresses a tarball of an already
configured system.
As Qbalt is based on woody (with backports), I was going to use a
customized version of boot-floppies (as I understand it could be
modified reasonably easily for my purposes), but it appears that it's
been completely dropped as I can't find it anywhere.
debian-installer indeed looks good, but in my brief play yesterday it
seems it depends on a testing/unstable system to be built; assumingly
because it isn't designed for woody, but instead distro's after this.
Any ideas/brainwaves on how I could achieve what I'm trying to do,
apart from my ugly method I'm using currently? ;-) Essentially, I'd
like to have *some* interactivity, if required, but nothing as verbose
as the current Debian installer (as it'll probably confuse the hell out
of most users).
R
--
linux.conf.au 2004 - Adelaide, Australia
http://lca2004.linux.org.au/
"Don't go, and you'll regret it!"
Reply to: