RE: [Gnoppix-devel] GNOPPIX and Morphix colaboration

[Raphael Schmid]

Hi Sven, Hi List,

> please don't write these mail directly to me but to the development 
> list.
I tried that three times before writing directly to you.

> >     - Provide a user-friendly installation tool for Linux
> >       distributions.
> 
>   That's one of the goals we have.
Cool :-)

> >     - 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.
Well, it's a goal that _I_ have. And it's practical from a
certain viewpoint. Especially when you look at how many new
distributions are emerging from earth's womb every day like
mushrooms in a wet forest.

>   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.
Meanwhile I've taken a look at Morphix, and they're doing some-
thing I long had had the idea for. (Too bad it's them who get
all the credits for it now :-P). It's their mods. That's how
you get flexibility in what you have available on your CD. (Just
think CD-RW!!). In any case, my proposal also includes installing
a system by copying the contents of a cloop device, if you've read
that ;-).

> >     - 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.
Well, having an "install this distribution" icon on the desktop would
surely be a cool sur-plus. But what if you want to install it in the
first place, without going through the trouble of having to boot a full-
blown desktop first? My idea would be to having two _bootloader_ choices:
- Install this System
- Boot this System

Can still have the desktop icon of course, and should as well have.

> >     - 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.
Again, I was proposing the collaboration between two projects here (yours
and mine; it's probably the proposal of collaboration between three projects
now, given the activities with Morphix). And I'm also concerned of people
who can not or do not want to start X in order to install a system. CGTK is
the easiest way to accomplish that.

        - Raphael