Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Project:Installer
On Mon, 27 Jul 2015 21:19:39 +1000, Hans wrote: I could, with some help from a Bash coder, create a USB stick that runs Gentoo and a Bash script to install Gentoo on a hard drive. I have about 80% done as Cut Paste script. My bottleneck is running fdisk and feeding commands to fdisk from within a bash script. Use parted instead. -- Neil Bothwick We have a equal opportunity Calculus class -- it's fully integrated. pgplVmTuIcCxF.pgp Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Project:Installer
(This has ended up hard to read; I hope it's not my tablet that's messed up the message threading, but apologies in advance if it is) On 27 July 2015 3:19:50 AM AEST, James wirel...@tampabay.rr.com wrote: Bruce Schultz brulzki at gmail.com writes: Matthew Marchese maffblas...@gentoo.org writes: I see that you've found stager. I'd like you to share your thoughts on what a perfect installer Gentoo could do. A successful gentoo installer will: Be multi-faceted so that many different, but common installation outcomes are not only possible, but are automated to the point of extreme convenience for folks to use them, as they choose. Let's face it no matter what we do, most noobs will not use Gentoo. But, those folks with some level of experience and competence will use gentoo; many more if there is an automated (base)installation. After all, when google or others corporations install and use gentoo, do you think they have folks spend 1-2 days using the handbook? NO, their gentoo(derivative) has an automated installation. So a base-installer for your [category 1] is the most important part. So in that train of thought, WE, should parse out all of the good parts of many different installers and installation schemes, as a part of the research and leverage as to what exists that can be leveraged or emulated, Debian included. OpenSuse has (13.2) has a slick install that allows for btrfs without lvm or mdadm. That was the default pathway. I've read that you can end up with a full raid install if you choose the advanced pathway. I'm still researching that one. Then there is 'Calculate Linux' that more than one gentoo dev uses routinely to install Gentoo. There are many pathways to streamline the installation of Gentoo. Many, for onerous reasons believe that is a bad idea. There is plenty of existing installation code that sets up MBR and ext*; so that's a no brainer on how to do that. Newer technologies, like btrfs are tricky. Why do you think btrfs is tricky? The last few systems I have installed on have been btrfs based, and once you add the subvolume= option in fstab the boot command line its no more tricky than any other install, IMO. In my opinion, there's really 3 parts to the install process, and I think it helps to distinguish between them. I think a complete installer program has to address all 3, but each task could be modularised. 1. The low level decisions, like disk partitioning, raid and disk mirroring, filesystem choices like ext4, btrfs, zfs, or some other. For a VM, the choices here might include creating a new LVM volume or btrfs subvolume Gentoo is not going to formally support ZFS as has been stated before. However supporting ZFS by others is well documented and some maverick could easily extend the gentoo-base installer for a target system (after your Category-1) where ZFS is installed. Just not officially gentoo. (I only added zfs because the previous post mentioned it) 2. Installing system files, which is not much more than untaring the stage3, and low level system configuration of make.conf settings, choice of profile, locale timezone settings, users passwords, networking, choice of syslog from, etc Category-2 This is a pretty easy part to automate. Many have stated that all of this information could be gathered up before the actual installation (batched) begins and parsed out at the appropriate time during the actually (automated) installation. Agreed. But what is missing is a common interface for passing the details from the category 1 to category 2; whether that is a config file or some other mechanism All of Category 1 as well as some parts of Category-2 are what I refer to as the base-install. After that point is when you make key decisions like workstation vs server vs embedded vs tablet. 3. Higher level system configuration to get to a finalised state This is the part of the traditional Gentoo handbook I do agree with. This is the part of the installation where noobs begin to actually learn gentoo, or at least those parts necessary for routine administration and usage. This is part of the handbook that is trivial for experience *nix folks as most are familiar with more than one package manager or software installation semantic. Most of these sorts of noobs (folks that struggle with maintaining a *nix system) are never going to profile low level kernel code or compare one file system against
[gentoo-user] Re: Project:Installer
On 27/07/15 03:29, James wrote: wabenbau at gmail.com writes: I used to install and look after OpenSuse Desk and Laptops until systemd showed it's ugly face. Now I install and look after several Gentoo Xfce desktops and 3 OpenSuse Xfce Laptops. I use a Cut Paste script to install Gentoo on Desktops. The only manual parts are booting a Gentoo USB stick, modifying hostname, ip address, user names and partitioning. When completed. Wen done, log in as user and set up email accounts and various eye candy. Sounds reasonable. Wouldn't it be great if that was an automated semantic we could all use? OpenSuse install on laptop involves booting of a installation USB stick, select Xfce Desktop, manually enter time zone, user name, counry, hostname, ip address, Samba, login as user and and set up email accounts and various eye candy. I am to stupid to install and get Gentoo to work on Laptops. Um, I disagree. The disk/bios/bootstrap issues are perverted by the manufacturers, particularly on laptops, tablets and embedded devices as to soot their business goals; hence on a laptop the preventative issues are magnified. You are not alone in this struggle. My dream would be to have the OpensSuse Yast installer and administration gui to install, configure and maintain Gentoo on Desktops and Laptops. This should be easy for a programmer whois familiar with Ruby and C. The Yast installer and administration gui's are nothing more than gui interfaced to various command line utilities. If it works, I'd use it, regardless of Yast. Maybe we can find a person that knows Yast (Ruby and such) to hire to write a similar installer for GEntoo? I'm not against hiring the right person to write a gentoo installer:: as long as I get a BTRFS raid 1 base system out of it. DONE DEAL! If anyone is interested, just drop me some private email. It has to open sourced. Yast was one of the reasons why I switched from SUSE to gentoo in 2003. IIRC one problem with Yast was that it used it's own configuration files and not the standard upstream configuration files of the installed packages. This sometimes made the manual configuration of packages very difficult for me, because the original package documentation refers to config files that I could not found on my SUSE system. Another caveat was that if one of the Yast config files was altered by hand, it was not possible to configure this file with Yast anymore. Of course in the beginning of my Linux experience (SuSE 4.2) I was happy that there was Yast because I came from OS/2 and it was a nightmare for me to configure Linux the first time, even with Yast. Without Yast I maybe would not use Linux today. Maybe Yast is better today, but in the past it was sometimes very frustrating. OK, so we need an expert here. Any takers? Make a few dollars and get famous for writing (hacking) a gentoo installer for the gentoo-commoners? Anyone? James I don't really think that there is a requirement for Ruby. Today's Yast2 is simply a GUI like grsync that calls on command line utilities. This can be done using the GTK C library. The Yast running in a terminal appears to be a ncurses interface to the same command line utilities. I could, with some help from a Bash coder, create a USB stick that runs Gentoo and a Bash script to install Gentoo on a hard drive. I have about 80% done as Cut Paste script. My bottleneck is running fdisk and feeding commands to fdisk from within a bash script. Running Gentoo from a USB stick with Grub static is no problem if you don't mind that its slw. I use 2TB USB drive with Gentoo Xfce installed to back up my families Laptops. Plug in the USB drive. Power on the Laptop, Login as Laptop-1. Click the Backup or Restore Icon to start the required rsync session. Have lunch or surf the net. Will make a image for a USB stick with or without Xfce if someone is seriously interested. This USB stick require DHCP from a router for networking and have only VGA video.
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Project:Installer
On 27 July 2015 9:24:30 PM AEST, Neil Bothwick n...@digimed.co.uk wrote: On Mon, 27 Jul 2015 21:19:39 +1000, Hans wrote: I could, with some help from a Bash coder, create a USB stick that runs Gentoo and a Bash script to install Gentoo on a hard drive. I have about 80% done as Cut Paste script. My bottleneck is running fdisk and feeding commands to fdisk from within a bash script. Use parted instead. Or sfdisk -- :b
[gentoo-user] Re: Project:Installer
Bruce Schultz brulzki at gmail.com writes: (This has ended up hard to read; I hope it's not my tablet that's messed up the message threading, but apologies in advance if it is) Nope. I use gmane as a front end and it is aggressive in trying to keep posts small. It also rambles a bit so here is my condensed sentiments:: The install process can be broken down to (2) main parts (imho):: (1) Low level hardware, file systems and the mimimum of configs to get a working reboot-able (withoout the installation medium) installation. My base-install is a btrfs, dual disk raid-1 base system, with fstab, efi gpt and grup-2 issues solved, configured and able to be studied as to how configuration was accomplished. If it can be done without mdadm and lvm the that's even better. For this I am willing to *pay* the right person to develop this open source software. Note a base system is probably going to be smaller than a 'default profile system', but it's the same idea, except from it you can build up a myriad of targets. This would essentially consist of the hard drive setup including grub2, gpt, btrfs, raid1, fstab/mtab, mbr-or-efi type of issuse. Menu drive would be keen or a gui installer (YaST). (2) Decide if the device is embedded, tablet, laptop, workstation, cluster, server, firewall or whatever target. Set up the configs and install the appropriate packages that complement the chosen system profile. This part could easily remain manual. It would be an exercise for the noob/user/expert to develop a set of ansible (or whatever) rules to control the build out of the target system. It would continue to be the 'noob filter' that so many experienced gentoo folks seem to like. The self development of automation for multiple system, beyond the functional core (baseline install) is the responsibility of the gentoo user to develop. So it would filter out those 'undesirables' both devs and long term gentoo members seem to abhor. (Not my issue either way). Other key points:: Read up on stage 4 installs as that work is very doable and is being pursued and has the blessing of the dev community, so it is most likely to happen. YaST, ported to GENTOO would be a warmly received project, imho. Better still we have part of yast in gentoo already, just 'eix libyui'. [1,2.3] Besides opensuse others use Calculate Linux or Sabayon Linux then just convert to gentoo:: hth, James [1] http://libyui.sourceforge.net/ [2] https://github.com/libyui/libyui [3] http://michal.hrusecky.net/2011/08/libyui-in-gentoo/
[gentoo-user] Re: Project:Installer
James wireless at tampabay.rr.com writes: 80% done as Cut Paste script. My bottleneck is running fdisk and feeding commands to fdisk from within a bash script. Remember, you have this codebase to look at for ideas on bash installs:: https://github.com/agaffney/quickstart Running Gentoo from a USB stick with Grub static is no problem if you don't mind that its slw. I use 2TB USB drive with Gentoo Xfce installed to back up my families Laptops. Plug in the USB drive. Power on the Laptop, Login as Laptop-1. Click the Backup or Restore Icon to start the required rsync session. Have lunch or surf the net. Will make a image for a USB stick with or without Xfce if someone is seriously interested. This USB stick require DHCP from a router for networking and have only VGA video. Persistence on the usb stick will allow for software to be added or removed, so it might speed up your development efforts to roll out images for testing; here are some more links that might help:: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/LiveDVD-Persistence-Mode https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Install_Gentoo_on_a_bootable_USB_stick For expertise help, maffblaster might just review what you have done and give you ideas on how to complete an installer via bash. He originally said he wanted to port the bash to python(3), if my memory is correct. hth, James 'eix libyui' hth, James [1] http://libyui.sourceforge.net/ [2] https://github.com/libyui/libyui [3] http://michal.hrusecky.net/2011/08/libyui-in-gentoo/
[gentoo-user] Re: Project:Installer
Hans linux at interworld.net.au writes: OK, so we need an expert here. Any takers? Make a few dollars and get famous for writing (hacking) a gentoo installer for the gentoo-commoners? Anyone? James I don't really think that there is a requirement for Ruby. Today's Yast2 is simply a GUI like grsync that calls on command line utilities. This can be done using the GTK C library. The Yast running in a terminal appears to be a ncurses interface to the same command line utilities. I could, with some help from a Bash coder, create a USB stick that runs Gentoo and a Bash script to install Gentoo on a hard drive. I have about 80% done as Cut Paste script. My bottleneck is running fdisk and feeding commands to fdisk from within a bash script. Running Gentoo from a USB stick with Grub static is no problem if you don't mind that its slw. I use 2TB USB drive with Gentoo Xfce installed to back up my families Laptops. Plug in the USB drive. Power on the Laptop, Login as Laptop-1. Click the Backup or Restore Icon to start the required rsync session. Have lunch or surf the net. Will make a image for a USB stick with or without Xfce if someone is seriously interested. This USB stick require DHCP from a router for networking and have only VGA video. My specific needs (and something many others will like) is to end up with the base-install of (2) HD/SSD running btrfs-raid-1 and all the appropriate configs completed (gpt, grub-2, fstab/mtab and mbr/efi issues included. That, automated and open-sourced is what I'm willing to *pay* for. If you are interested in that, drop me some private email. I have zero issues with normal handbook installations. btrfs-raid1 is really the only option I have strong interest in, just so you know. I am sympathetic to and understand both sides of the issues. I just hope that the larger *nix community does not see this 'lack of an installer' as a mean spirited issue, as I do not believe it is. It is a confounding issue. I'll surely test what you offer. These links might help [1,2,3]. Maybe Michal will help too, as he seems to be a Osuse-Gentoo type of hack, with some expertise in Yast and it's components. 'eix libyui' hth, James [1] http://libyui.sourceforge.net/ [2] https://github.com/libyui/libyui [3] http://michal.hrusecky.net/2011/08/libyui-in-gentoo/
[gentoo-user] Re: Project:Installer
Hans linux at interworld.net.au writes: I could, with some help from a Bash coder, create a USB stick that runs Gentoo and a Bash script to install Gentoo on a hard drive. I have about 80% done as Cut Paste script. My bottleneck is running fdisk and feeding commands to fdisk from within a bash script. Participation Want to join the project? Have the best-idea-ever that would make the best-installer-ever? Visit the #gentoo-stager channel on Freenode IRC and message maffblaster. That's from :: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Installer hth, James
[gentoo-user] Re: Project:Installer
On 18/07/15 03:25, James wrote: From [1] we have Project:Installer [2] which looks very interesting. However, If I were to create a new gentoo installer, I think I'd leverage ansible and the persistence mode (usb stick) code that LikeWhoa put together, as a basis for the effort. I'd be most curious to read other folk's ideas (strategies) to create a more automated installation semantic for installing gentoo systems. The handbook is fine; in fact it is great. But, many gentoo users that have performed more than a dozen gentoo installs sooner or later get around to their own installations customizations for a wide variety of valid reasons. Ansible would lend itself to expanded and very targeted types of system installs where an accomplished gentoo user could supplement the base install with a collection of specific packages and config settings; imho. Say for example a secure web or mail server, not that it would be the only way to build such a server, but just one specific method a particular author wanted to (share) publish. Surely there are other and better ideas that folks have used or that they are currently contemplating for routine gentoo installs? Maybe some discussion herein could help shape the efforts of [2,3]? Naturally, we should remember Release Engineering and their role as pivotal [3]. [1 and 2] are interesting to read. James [1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Gentoo [2] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Installer [3] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:RelEng_GRS I used to install and look after OpenSuse Desk and Laptops until systemd showed it's ugly face. Now I install and look after several Gentoo Xfce desktops and 3 OpenSuse Xfce Laptops. I use a Cut Paste script to install Gentoo on Desktops. The only manual parts are booting a Gentoo USB stick, modifying hostname, ip address, user names and partitioning. When completed. Wen done, log in as user and set up email accounts and various eye candy. OpenSuse install on laptop involves booting of a installation USB stick, select Xfce Desktop, manually enter time zone, user name, counry, hostname, ip address, Samba, login as user and and set up email accounts and various eye candy. I am to stupid to install and get Gentoo to work on Laptops. My dream would be to have the OpensSuse Yast installer and administration gui to install, configure and maintain Gentoo on Desktops and Laptops. This should be easy for a programmer whois familiar with Ruby and C. The Yast installer and administration gui's are nothing more than gui interfaced to various command line utilities.
[gentoo-user] Re: Project:Installer
wabenbau at gmail.com writes: I used to install and look after OpenSuse Desk and Laptops until systemd showed it's ugly face. Now I install and look after several Gentoo Xfce desktops and 3 OpenSuse Xfce Laptops. I use a Cut Paste script to install Gentoo on Desktops. The only manual parts are booting a Gentoo USB stick, modifying hostname, ip address, user names and partitioning. When completed. Wen done, log in as user and set up email accounts and various eye candy. Sounds reasonable. Wouldn't it be great if that was an automated semantic we could all use? OpenSuse install on laptop involves booting of a installation USB stick, select Xfce Desktop, manually enter time zone, user name, counry, hostname, ip address, Samba, login as user and and set up email accounts and various eye candy. I am to stupid to install and get Gentoo to work on Laptops. Um, I disagree. The disk/bios/bootstrap issues are perverted by the manufacturers, particularly on laptops, tablets and embedded devices as to soot their business goals; hence on a laptop the preventative issues are magnified. You are not alone in this struggle. My dream would be to have the OpensSuse Yast installer and administration gui to install, configure and maintain Gentoo on Desktops and Laptops. This should be easy for a programmer whois familiar with Ruby and C. The Yast installer and administration gui's are nothing more than gui interfaced to various command line utilities. If it works, I'd use it, regardless of Yast. Maybe we can find a person that knows Yast (Ruby and such) to hire to write a similar installer for GEntoo? I'm not against hiring the right person to write a gentoo installer:: as long as I get a BTRFS raid 1 base system out of it. DONE DEAL! If anyone is interested, just drop me some private email. It has to open sourced. Yast was one of the reasons why I switched from SUSE to gentoo in 2003. IIRC one problem with Yast was that it used it's own configuration files and not the standard upstream configuration files of the installed packages. This sometimes made the manual configuration of packages very difficult for me, because the original package documentation refers to config files that I could not found on my SUSE system. Another caveat was that if one of the Yast config files was altered by hand, it was not possible to configure this file with Yast anymore. Of course in the beginning of my Linux experience (SuSE 4.2) I was happy that there was Yast because I came from OS/2 and it was a nightmare for me to configure Linux the first time, even with Yast. Without Yast I maybe would not use Linux today. Maybe Yast is better today, but in the past it was sometimes very frustrating. OK, so we need an expert here. Any takers? Make a few dollars and get famous for writing (hacking) a gentoo installer for the gentoo-commoners? Anyone? James
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Project:Installer
Hans li...@interworld.net.au wrote: On 18/07/15 03:25, James wrote: From [1] we have Project:Installer [2] which looks very interesting. However, If I were to create a new gentoo installer, I think I'd leverage ansible and the persistence mode (usb stick) code that LikeWhoa put together, as a basis for the effort. I'd be most curious to read other folk's ideas (strategies) to create a more automated installation semantic for installing gentoo systems. The handbook is fine; in fact it is great. But, many gentoo users that have performed more than a dozen gentoo installs sooner or later get around to their own installations customizations for a wide variety of valid reasons. Ansible would lend itself to expanded and very targeted types of system installs where an accomplished gentoo user could supplement the base install with a collection of specific packages and config settings; imho. Say for example a secure web or mail server, not that it would be the only way to build such a server, but just one specific method a particular author wanted to (share) publish. Surely there are other and better ideas that folks have used or that they are currently contemplating for routine gentoo installs? Maybe some discussion herein could help shape the efforts of [2,3]? Naturally, we should remember Release Engineering and their role as pivotal [3]. [1 and 2] are interesting to read. James [1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Gentoo [2] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Installer [3] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:RelEng_GRS I used to install and look after OpenSuse Desk and Laptops until systemd showed it's ugly face. Now I install and look after several Gentoo Xfce desktops and 3 OpenSuse Xfce Laptops. I use a Cut Paste script to install Gentoo on Desktops. The only manual parts are booting a Gentoo USB stick, modifying hostname, ip address, user names and partitioning. When completed. Wen done, log in as user and set up email accounts and various eye candy. OpenSuse install on laptop involves booting of a installation USB stick, select Xfce Desktop, manually enter time zone, user name, counry, hostname, ip address, Samba, login as user and and set up email accounts and various eye candy. I am to stupid to install and get Gentoo to work on Laptops. My dream would be to have the OpensSuse Yast installer and administration gui to install, configure and maintain Gentoo on Desktops and Laptops. This should be easy for a programmer whois familiar with Ruby and C. The Yast installer and administration gui's are nothing more than gui interfaced to various command line utilities. Yast was one of the reasons why I switched from SUSE to gentoo in 2003. IIRC one problem with Yast was that it used it's own configuration files and not the standard upstream configuration files of the installed packages. This sometimes made the manual configuration of packages very difficult for me, because the original package documentation refers to config files that I could not found on my SUSE system. Another caveat was that if one of the Yast config files was altered by hand, it was not possible to configure this file with Yast anymore. Of course in the beginning of my Linux experience (SuSE 4.2) I was happy that there was Yast because I came from OS/2 and it was a nightmare for me to configure Linux the first time, even with Yast. Without Yast I maybe would not use Linux today. Maybe Yast is better today, but in the past it was sometimes very frustrating. -- Regards wabe
[gentoo-user] Re: Project:Installer
Bruce Schultz brulzki at gmail.com writes: Matthew Marchese maffblas...@gentoo.org writes: I see that you've found stager. I'd like you to share your thoughts on what a perfect installer Gentoo could do. A successful gentoo installer will: Be multi-faceted so that many different, but common installation outcomes are not only possible, but are automated to the point of extreme convenience for folks to use them, as they choose. Let's face it no matter what we do, most noobs will not use Gentoo. But, those folks with some level of experience and competence will use gentoo; many more if there is an automated (base)installation. After all, when google or others corporations install and use gentoo, do you think they have folks spend 1-2 days using the handbook? NO, their gentoo(derivative) has an automated installation. So a base-installer for your [category 1] is the most important part. So in that train of thought, WE, should parse out all of the good parts of many different installers and installation schemes, as a part of the research and leverage as to what exists that can be leveraged or emulated, Debian included. OpenSuse has (13.2) has a slick install that allows for btrfs without lvm or mdadm. That was the default pathway. I've read that you can end up with a full raid install if you choose the advanced pathway. I'm still researching that one. Then there is 'Calculate Linux' that more than one gentoo dev uses routinely to install Gentoo. There are many pathways to streamline the installation of Gentoo. Many, for onerous reasons believe that is a bad idea. There is plenty of existing installation code that sets up MBR and ext*; so that's a no brainer on how to do that. Newer technologies, like btrfs are tricky. In my opinion, there's really 3 parts to the install process, and I think it helps to distinguish between them. I think a complete installer program has to address all 3, but each task could be modularised. 1. The low level decisions, like disk partitioning, raid and disk mirroring, filesystem choices like ext4, btrfs, zfs, or some other. For a VM, the choices here might include creating a new LVM volume or btrfs subvolume Gentoo is not going to formally support ZFS as has been stated before. However supporting ZFS by others is well documented and some maverick could easily extend the gentoo-base installer for a target system (after your Category-1) where ZFS is installed. Just not officially gentoo. 2. Installing system files, which is not much more than untaring the stage3, and low level system configuration of make.conf settings, choice of profile, locale timezone settings, users passwords, networking, choice of syslog from, etc Category-2 This is a pretty easy part to automate. Many have stated that all of this information could be gathered up before the actual installation (batched) begins and parsed out at the appropriate time during the actually (automated) installation. All of Category 1 as well as some parts of Category-2 are what I refer to as the base-install. After that point is when you make key decisions like workstation vs server vs embedded vs tablet. 3. Higher level system configuration to get to a finalised state This is the part of the traditional Gentoo handbook I do agree with. This is the part of the installation where noobs begin to actually learn gentoo, or at least those parts necessary for routine administration and usage. This is part of the handbook that is trivial for experience *nix folks as most are familiar with more than one package manager or software installation semantic. Most of these sorts of noobs (folks that struggle with maintaining a *nix system) are never going to profile low level kernel code or compare one file system against another, so why make it mandatory to master category 1 in order to install, use and enjoy gentoo? Currently, the lack of a gentoo installer is exactly that:: a blocker to noobs. That's not my issue:: the devs are using 'mis-direction' here to prohibit the creation of a slick-smooth-unattended-useful base-install semantic for those with moderate *nix skills, imho. YMMV. That's my issue. Dont belive me? Just go to gentoo-dev and read the flack that MaffBlaster caught on the list, merely for discussion a new installation semantic. Hence the focus on 'stage-4' install code.
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Project:Installer
On 25 July 2015 11:09:36 PM AEST, lee l...@yagibdah.de wrote: Matthew Marchese maffblas...@gentoo.org writes: Hi all, I see that you've found stager. I'd like you to share your thoughts on what a perfect installer Gentoo could do. The Debian installer is the best one I've seen so far. If you're thinking towards Redhat, the Fedora installer can't even do partitioning, and the Centos 7 one was just the like. They suck horribly, and they don't give you choices. In my opinion, there's really 3 parts to the install process, and I think it helps to distinguish between them. I think a complete installer program has to address all 3, but each task could be modularised. 1. The low level decisions, like disk partitioning, raid and disk mirroring, filesystem choices like ext4, btrfs, zfs, or some other. For a VM, the choices here might include creating a new LVM volume or btrfs subvolume 2. Installing system files, which is not much more than untaring the stage3, and low level system configuration of make.conf settings, choice of profile, locale timezone settings, users passwords, networking, choice of syslog from, etc 3. Higher level system configuration to get to a finalised state (Of course, there's quite a bit of blurring between the stages.) I'm not so interested in 1, but gentoo really shines here because there are no restrictions. But there are so many options that it makes it a big task to tackle, unless you pare it down and focus on a few typical use cases like a standard desktop install Part 2 is where it would be good to have a standardised approach, along the lines of debian's debootstrap utility. Something that takes a target directory and installs all the files needed to build a bare-bones system inside it. Its actually not that difficult to write a shell script to achieve this, which is probably why there are so many posted around the interests. But something standardised could be the basis of a gui installer, or the center of a container installer such as the lxc-gentoo script or whatever the docker equivalent is. The 3rd task is more in the realm of tools such as ansible or puppet. Having that said, and having done few Gentoo installations: I'm merely wishing installing Gentoo wasn't such a lengthy process. It's lengthy in that you have to do the steps manually while browsing the excellent handbook. If there was an installer that would guide you through these steps and bring up the files you need to edit in an editor, that could save a lot of time already. It could reduce the possibility for error, as in overlooking that you need to do some step. Which is what part 2 is about. I started writing my own installer based on using ebuild files for the configuration. But I like your idea of an interactive mode for configuration. Otoh, I have to come to like how Gentoo is installed. You can do whatever you like, and the process is pretty straightforward. I don't see how an installer could give you that, yet a perfect installer would need to. And that is the difficulty inherent in a gentoo installer... If its too restrictive, its not really gentoo anymore; if its flexible to cover all the options, you may as well just stick with typing commands in a shell... How about support for booting from ZFS? I'd really like to see that; it should be as easy as booting from other file systems. Without it, we have to do ugly things. -- :b
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Project:Installer
Matthew Marchese maffblas...@gentoo.org writes: Hi all, I see that you've found stager. I'd like you to share your thoughts on what a perfect installer Gentoo could do. The Debian installer is the best one I've seen so far. If you're thinking towards Redhat, the Fedora installer can't even do partitioning, and the Centos 7 one was just the like. They suck horribly, and they don't give you choices. Having that said, and having done few Gentoo installations: I'm merely wishing installing Gentoo wasn't such a lengthy process. It's lengthy in that you have to do the steps manually while browsing the excellent handbook. If there was an installer that would guide you through these steps and bring up the files you need to edit in an editor, that could save a lot of time already. It could reduce the possibility for error, as in overlooking that you need to do some step. Otoh, I have to come to like how Gentoo is installed. You can do whatever you like, and the process is pretty straightforward. I don't see how an installer could give you that, yet a perfect installer would need to. How about support for booting from ZFS? I'd really like to see that; it should be as easy as booting from other file systems. Without it, we have to do ugly things. -- Again we must be afraid of speaking of daemons for fear that daemons might swallow us. Finally, this fear has become reasonable.
[gentoo-user] Re: Project:Installer
J.Rutkowski jrtk at pancakebungalow.com writes: It appears Kickstart may not necessarily require Anaconda as it is compatible the the Ubuntu installer [1]. While Kickstart itself may or may not be ideal, I think having install parameters in one single file is intriguing. UPdate:: https://github.com/gentoo/stager Python is the primary language so that is very encouraging. It'd be really cool is support for BTRFS was included, imho. James
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Project:Installer
Hi all, I see that you've found stager. I'd like you to share your thoughts on what a perfect installer Gentoo could do. Feel free to open an Issue request on GitHub. I may reject them, but I'm certainly open to community participation! On other notes, I see that you've found Kickstart. You almost might be interested in Andrew Gaffney's Quickstart project: https://github.com/agaffney/quickstart Gaffney worked on the previous Gentoo installer around 2006-2009. All other Quickstart projects have most likely been forked from his code. :) Hope you find this helpful! maffblaster On 7/18/2015 12:11 PM, James wrote: J.Rutkowski jrtk at pancakebungalow.com writes: It appears Kickstart may not necessarily require Anaconda as it is compatible the the Ubuntu installer [1]. While Kickstart itself may or may not be ideal, I think having install parameters in one single file is intriguing. UPdate:: https://github.com/gentoo/stager Python is the primary language so that is very encouraging. It'd be really cool is support for BTRFS was included, imho. James
[gentoo-user] Re: Project:Installer
Matthew Marchese maffblaster at gentoo.org writes: maffblaster You are already my *fav_dev* just for taking on this subject:: I'm gonna encourage other folks to participate Surely I'll be testing your stage 4 offerings:: amd64 arm8v You're gonna support arm8v right out the shoot, right? Here is the stage 3 for my 96board:: http://dev.gentoo.org/~tgall/ THANKS! James
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Project:Installer
2015-07-17 11:55 GMT-06:00 James wirel...@tampabay.rr.com: J.Rutkowski jrtk at pancakebungalow.com writes: Anyone take a look at RHEL Kickstart for automated installs? Yes Kickstart is very cool [4] and an examination of it, if not outright usage, is a keen idea for discussion. Has anyone actually used kickstart to install gentoo? If so, any links or comments would be keen to read about. I'm not sure if it would be usable in gentoo, maybe sabayon that already uses Anaconda as installer, seems kickstart is mostly a remote wrapper for Anaconda[1] directed at sysadmins for automation. A few days a go I found this, is that is sh compatible: https://github.com/zentoo/quickstart [1] http://www.redhat.com/magazine/024oct06/features/kickstart/
[gentoo-user] Re: Project:Installer
J.Rutkowski jrtk at pancakebungalow.com writes: Anyone take a look at RHEL Kickstart for automated installs? Yes Kickstart is very cool [4] and an examination of it, if not outright usage, is a keen idea for discussion. Has anyone actually used kickstart to install gentoo? If so, any links or comments would be keen to read about. James [4] https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/ 5/html/Installation_Guide/ch-kickstart2.html
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Project:Installer
It appears Kickstart may not necessarily require Anaconda as it is compatible the the Ubuntu installer [1]. While Kickstart itself may or may not be ideal, I think having install parameters in one single file is intriguing. [1] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KickstartCompatibility J. Rutkowski On Fri, Jul 17, 2015, at 01:06 PM, Jc García wrote: 2015-07-17 11:55 GMT-06:00 James wirel...@tampabay.rr.com: J.Rutkowski jrtk at pancakebungalow.com writes: Anyone take a look at RHEL Kickstart for automated installs? Yes Kickstart is very cool [4] and an examination of it, if not outright usage, is a keen idea for discussion. Has anyone actually used kickstart to install gentoo? If so, any links or comments would be keen to read about. I'm not sure if it would be usable in gentoo, maybe sabayon that already uses Anaconda as installer, seems kickstart is mostly a remote wrapper for Anaconda[1] directed at sysadmins for automation. A few days a go I found this, is that is sh compatible: https://github.com/zentoo/quickstart [1] http://www.redhat.com/magazine/024oct06/features/kickstart/
