Re: Proposal for integration of the graphical installer
On Mon, May 15, 2006 at 08:55:02AM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Sat, May 13, 2006 at 11:23:52PM +0200, Frans Pop wrote:
> > - We'll continue to produce separate cd, mini.iso and hd-media images;
> > creating netboot images seems less obvious because of the size of
> > the initrd.
>
> A netboot mini.iso would be useful, but for powerpc there's probably not
> a lot of point in other netboot images; most of the machines that might
> be able to use this use yaboot, and we're already running up against its
> TFTP limit with non-GUI images.
I disagree. yaboot is a mess to setup for netbooting, and IBM chrp boxes have
a bug which excludes yaboot netbooting (only one file can be loaded through
TFTP). On top of that, the current yaboot (and we can't probably change it
without another 6+ month flamewar with Ethan Benson), limits the yaboot
netboot buffer to 6MB, which is problematic for g-i on powerpc.
Furthermore, the netboot images can be easily booted from the OF command line,
without any additional setup like DHCP/BOOTP, which is a benefit.
Finally, altough the older g-i failed on my PReP boxes (probably due to big
size, or missing sisfb support in the kernel), there may be still a chance
that the current g-i images may work on PReP, and yaboot doesn't work there.
For all those reasons, i would build the netboot g-i images, it costs not much
to build them, and since they are not going to be included on the isos ...
> > Including the g-i images on the netinst will mean that it will grow bigger
> > than its current "maximum" size of 110 MB. The 110 MB limit is set mostly
> > to allow installations from a 128 MB USB-stick (hd-media image + netinst
> > iso together must be smaller than the capacity of the USB stick).
> > As we feel it is important to have the graphical installer available on
> > all CD types, we propose to relax the current size limit. This will mean
> > that the default image for USB installations will become 256 MB instead
> > of 128 MB.
> > We'd prefer not let the netinst grow unnecessarily, but relaxing the size
> > limit means that we could also for example include both initramfs-tools
> > and yaird (current netinst images only have one, not both).
>
> I agree with Sven that size isn't so much of a concern with powerpc due
> to the prevalence of slot-loading drives.
:)
Not growing the isos too much is still good on the download size though.
I am not sure if g-i is booting on powerpc right now though, last we tried in
january, it crashed.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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