RE: [Gnoppix-devel] GNOPPIX and Morphix colaboration

[Sven Herzberg]

Hi,

  please don't write these mail directly to me but to the development
list.

Am Fr, 2003-09-12 um 16.32 schrieb Raphael Schmid:
> just another thing. There's something else that struck me
> about your website, but only now it came to me that it was
> your stated intent of developing a GUI installation tool.
> 
> Well, as it happens to be, there's this screenshot:
>       http://images.freshmeat.net/screenshots/40291.png
> 
> The thing is called "The Installer", is a mere ~1200 LOC at
> the moment, and is written in C# (if it sucks, see it as a
> prototype, if it doesn't, it might actually become useful).
> Rest assured - the license displayed is BSD.
> 
>       - Provide a user-friendly installation tool for Linux
>         distributions.

  That's one of the goals we have.

>       - Make it also developer-friendly, so virtually every
>         woman and every man can develop a Linux distribution
>         and use this tool for installing it.

  That's not so very practical. See below for explanation.

>       - Have the tool work after a principle that first it
>         tries to do any configuration work by itself, and
>         only in case of "doubt", when an error occured, or
>         when a descision can't be made automatically asks
>         the user.
> 
>       - Use a plugin mechanism for the package installation
>         part. That way, you could use very diverse sources.
>         Examples include simple tar balls, RPM packages,
>         Debian packages, loopback filesystems, compressed
>         loopback filesystems, and anything from a harddisk
>         over CD-ROMs to FTP servers as media containers.

  That's the ugly point. We don't have space to provide an installed
system AND the packages needed for installation. This way we kind of
have to copy the cd content to disk.

>       - My 'dream process' would involve booting from a CD
>         and asking the user as soon as possible whether 
>         s/he'd like to run a live system or install the OS
>         to his or her computer.

  Yeah, something that we aim to. Just having a really cool linux live
cd and the "install" element directly on the user's desktop.

>       - Last but not least, on some systems using a GUI for
>         installation can be impractical, or even impossible.
>         The original idea had been to have different frontend
>         programs (GTK, NCurses, ...). Now there's Cursed GTK
>         (http://zemljanka.sourceforge.net/cursed/). Makes
>         things much easier.

  Something we don't need as we're already having a graphical (read: X
based) desktop environment running.

Regards,
  Sven

-- 
Sven Herzberg <address@hidden> · Jabber: address@hidden
GNOME Deutschland                  · http://www.gnome-de.org/
GNOPPIX                            · http://www.gnoppix.org/