On the F9 track, I have been playing around a bit with Pungi as a robust - and better fitting - install composer. It has several advantages over livecd-tools.
A minor problem is that it's impossible at the moment to build a F9 install CD without bringing in X.org server, Cairo and a good chunk of gnome. See http://marc.info/?l=fedora-buildsys-list&m=121740313820597&w=2
A "textonly" splitoff of anaconda and anaconda runtime that drop the X dependencies would shed ~200 MB of dependencies, and make F9 a better fit for embedded deployments, making the XS image smaller and nicer along the way... hint, hint... :-)
Another interesting track is making the "CD installer" work from a usb stick, modding livecd-iso-to-disk, see http://marc.info/?l=fedora-buildsys-list&m=121740508223325&w=2
The XS image doesn't have strict dietary requirements as the XO image, but my aim is to fit in one CD and/or as small a USB disk as possible. Content packages will definitely take up the slack :-)
cheers,
martin
Martin Langhoff wrote:
On the F9 track, I have been playing around a bit with Pungi as a robust - and better fitting - install composer. It has several advantages over livecd-tools.
A minor problem is that it's impossible at the moment to build a F9 install CD without bringing in X.org server, Cairo and a good chunk of gnome. See http://marc.info/?l=fedora-buildsys-list&m=121740313820597&w=2
A "textonly" splitoff of anaconda and anaconda runtime that drop the X dependencies would shed ~200 MB of dependencies, and make F9 a better fit for embedded deployments, making the XS image smaller and nicer along the way... hint, hint... :-)
Have you filed a RFE on this?
Rahul
On Wed, 2008-07-30 at 20:27 +1200, Martin Langhoff wrote:
A minor problem is that it's impossible at the moment to build a F9 install CD without bringing in X.org server, Cairo and a good chunk of gnome. See http://marc.info/?l=fedora-buildsys-list&m=121740313820597&w=2
A "textonly" splitoff of anaconda and anaconda runtime that drop the X dependencies would shed ~200 MB of dependencies, and make F9 a better fit for embedded deployments, making the XS image smaller and nicer along the way... hint, hint... :-)
NAK because the text mode installer is deprecated in major ways -- there's just no way to support the feature set that people want from the installer.
But, one of the changes that's been going into pungi this time around (after some changes that went into anaconda for F9) is making it so that have a much smaller repo set on the CD than is used for the buildinstall run. Thus, the installer images are complete (and use X) without requiring all of X, etc packages on the CD
Jeremy
On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 1:23 AM, Jeremy Katz katzj@redhat.com wrote:
A "textonly" splitoff of anaconda and anaconda runtime that drop the X dependencies would shed ~200 MB of dependencies, and make F9 a better fit for embedded deployments, making the XS image smaller and nicer along the way... hint, hint... :-)
NAK because the text mode installer is deprecated in major ways -- there's just no way to support the feature set that people want from the installer.
Interesting. I always understood the text installer would be easier to support in alt arches and embedded devices, etc. How do you plan to support installs over serial port on headless boxes?
Deprecated with plans to remove or deprecated = not recommended but will keep around?
cheers,
m
On Thu, 2008-07-31 at 07:59 +1200, Martin Langhoff wrote:
On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 1:23 AM, Jeremy Katz katzj@redhat.com wrote:
A "textonly" splitoff of anaconda and anaconda runtime that drop the X dependencies would shed ~200 MB of dependencies, and make F9 a better fit for embedded deployments, making the XS image smaller and nicer along the way... hint, hint... :-)
NAK because the text mode installer is deprecated in major ways -- there's just no way to support the feature set that people want from the installer.
Interesting. I always understood the text installer would be easier to support in alt arches and embedded devices, etc. How do you plan to support installs over serial port on headless boxes?
Kickstart and vnc both exist. Text mode limits you to 80x24, lots of problems supporting non-Latin languages, no input methods, poor toolkits, .. the list could go on for a while. You just can't provide the richness of user experience that's really needed to do some of the complex things that people want to do with an install in a text mode environment. And those sorts of complex setups are a lot of times as common, if not more so, on all sorts of things like serial port sand headless boxes
Deprecated with plans to remove or deprecated = not recommended but will keep around?
Deprecated with the eventual plan that text mode exists only for a) Get you into VNC or X b) Kickstart progress and c) A "delete everything, install with the defaults, no questions really asked" mode (maybe)
Jeremy
On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 8:35 AM, Jeremy Katz katzj@redhat.com wrote:
Interesting. I always understood the text installer would be easier to support in alt arches and embedded devices, etc. How do you plan to support installs over serial port on headless boxes?
Kickstart and vnc both exist. Text mode limits you to 80x24, lots of problems supporting non-Latin languages, no input methods, poor toolkits, .. the list could go on for a while. You just can't provide the richness of user experience that's really needed to do some of the complex things that people want to do with an install in a text mode environment. And those sorts of complex setups are a lot of times as common, if not more so, on all sorts of things like serial port sand headless boxes
I can understand the limitations you describe. Still, embedded devices and headless boxes are a growing space IMHO, and they are definitely the space I am working on, so I care about it.
X + VNC is a bit of an awkward setup, it eats ~300MB of installer media space and uses a sizable amount of RAM too. Can it run over serial? Media is getting cheaper, but it's odd to include all that machinery when the target install will _not_ have X.
Deprecated with the eventual plan that text mode exists only for a) Get you into VNC or X b) Kickstart progress and c) A "delete everything, install with the defaults, no questions really asked" mode (maybe)
Thanks - good to hear it's not going away. I will still need a working text mode for the basics however. Am I *that* weird? ;-)
cheers,
m
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Jeremy Katz -
Martin Langhoff -
Rahul Sundaram