Hi Alok, > Currently the Caiman architecture supports two types > of installers - a LiveCD based GUI and AI. Each of these installation > environments are different in that > one is a desktop based environment while the other is > not. As a result, they are both built on a different > set of packages with AI being built on a significantly > smaller set. > > As we provide more installation environments in the future > (text based interactive install, a media based AI and possibly a > network based text install), I think there are a couple of high order > issues that need to be sorted out. > > a) What kind of an image should these new installers > (text, media based AI) be based on? Since both these > installers are not going to offer a desktop installation > environment, does it make sense to base them on the > same set of packages as AI? I think it would be a > reasonable starting point.
Certainly, starting with the AI packages, and adding what is necessary to support a text based installer would make sense as a starting point. As for the AI media based installer, I would think that it would be almost the same in terms of image contents as the current AI image. The text based installer might require a few more packages to support the ncurses interface. It looks like Jan's initial research shows we can take the AI base image and make it bootable from media. > > b) Assuming some of these installers get delivered as > part of the same AI image, how should the selection > between which installer to use be made? The two obvious > choices are to provide them via the GRUB menu or as a > separate menu item that comes up as part of boot (kind of > like the keyboard and language selection menu in the > current LiveCD installer). I think one of the underlying > requirement here is to allow this to be scriptable. Also, > a consistent user experience on both sparc and x86 would > be nice. A separate menu items seems better on both counts. > With a media based install, interactive user input is certainly reasonable. A separate menu seems appropriate as well. How would you propose a consistent user experience on sparc and x86? I assume you are proposing to not use GRUB on x86, and use a separate menu item as part of boot up for both platforms? Or something like that? My personal opinion on this is that GRUB is the expected user interface for choosing the thing to boot from. I wouldn't think we would want to change that. For SPARC, we can add a selection menu, and of course allow for command line options that would indicate which one to boot. > c) AI and the LiveCD currently share the implementation > for the live-fs-root SMF method and it has been pointed > out that that's not very maintainable. The addition > of more installers to the mix, I think just exacerbates > the problems. It seems appropriate to restructure > live-fs-root as part of the media based AI and text install > work. Or, can be done as part of a bug fix? For example - > > http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=9549 > > What do people think about some of these issues? I agree we should restructure live-fs-root as part of the work for the media based AI and text installers. It needs to be done, and for the future for a text based network installer as well. And for replication and recovery... thanks, sarah **** > > Thanks, > Alok > _______________________________________________ > caiman-discuss mailing list > caiman-discuss at opensolaris.org > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/caiman-discuss
