Hello, As previously said, I'm currently porting the installer of Linux Mint to DDL. The final objective is to provide a CD/DVD *without* installer and then install the installer when the user requests the installation of DDL, from the command line. The reason for this is that the Mint installer requires around 100 MB of new packages to be installed because it is far more advanced than our installer. Among its features:
* selection of language with country flags * selection of keyboard with a graphical preview of the layout * selection of the timezone on the world map * guess of timezone based on IP * possible repartitioning thanks to GParted * nice slideshow during installation The work to port it consists in: * making the installer install DDL from the live CD * add/remove specific packages on the installed system * changing the graphics design to match DDL (drawers wanted) * rewriting the slideshow * writing a small interface to show during the process of installing the installer! As of writing I've been focusing on the first task and it was successful since I had DDL installed on an old laptop using the DVD of 2012-10 and a modified Mint installer. However I encountered several difficulties that I'm going to list, and particularly one that may make the installer *not* installable in every case, unless it is already shipping on the CD. The main issue is the amount of dependencies of the Mint installer that triggers the installation of around 100 MB of packages in DDL. If we don't ship DDL with the installer to save disk space, installing it in the live environment requires to find the free memory (RAM) to store the installed packages. The default of live CD's is to store everything in RAM without swap space on disk (they are then totally safe for the host computer – which we don't care when installing DDL!). If the computer doesn't have enough RAM, I suspect the installer to not be installable in all cases, unless we set a swap space on disk before installing it. NB: currently we are not able to deliver DDL 2.0 on a single CD so this issue is not that critical because we are far from using 4 GB of disk space on the DVD. So now let's list all the difficulties: * Internal disks are all mount read-only by DDL at boot, they couldn't then be written by the installer! (NB: it's just good news indeed ;) ) Solution: just unmount them before starting the actual installation process. * The installation process hung before the end due to lack of memory space. Solution: activate a swap space on disk before starting the actual installation process. This may not be an issue anymore if the installer is already on the CD/DVD but it is not sure. * The installer uses an external script called inxi that is not on Debian repositories. Solution: package our own version of this script. In the meanwhile, I just integrated the script into the installer package, dirty but working! * The installer failed on installing Grub2, which simply means the system could not boot! I still don't know the exact cause of this failure. The installer log seems to show that he couldn't get into the chrooted installed system to perform the final tasks. I installed it manually. * The installed system hadn't an /etc/resolv.conf file, preventing it from installing anything while being chrooted in. This may be the cause of the previous issue but I don't know why there was no such file. So to me, it seems the Mint installer is fitting our needs, especially with its nice features. If we ship DDL 2.0 with it *pre-installed*, we should avoid the most critical issues I encountered. The remaining work to have it on DDL 2.0 is then: * solve the issue with Grub2 * change its artwork * rewrite its slideshow * intensive testing!!! I'll give you ways to test it as soon as possible. I guess not everyone on the list wants to chroot into the installed system to manually install Grub2 from the command line :p. -- Cheers, JM.
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