I'm seeking feedback on install methods for SoaS (yes Bernie and Tomas I'm definitely looking in your direction - but not only you).
With the unfortunate demise of xyz-installer I would like to look at what options we have going forward. >From upstream there's liveinst, livecd-tools and the GUI (Windows and Linux) liveusb-creator. I've also seen alot of people mentioning the use of dd. I have concerns about advertising this to the average user that we are aiming SoaS to (teachers, new users and people that want to test it) primarily because its very easy to get it wrong. Its all too easy to accidentally pick the wrong device name and blow away you windows or linux install, or MBR. Not the sort of results we want to see for a new user. Its fine for an experienced user but then they already know how to use it and the possibilities that could come from it so for those users its not something we really need to document. I've also seen people wanting "PXE boot environments to boot SoaS". I personally think this is well and truly out of the scope of SoaS. You can achieve this easily using the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) and they have all the methods to be able to achieve this easily, its supported in Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian all of which package Sugar and hence with little work Sugar can be made available as a LTSP GUI interface. I would like to make it as easy as possibly for all alternate install options be used from the main SoaS release but would still like to keep it simple on the main download pages so new users don't have to chose from 100 different options..... that isn't easy! It becomes scary for the average teacher. Ultimately for that class of users there should be a single download option and a choice of 2 or 3 ways to install it which should mostly be due to which platform they want to use to create the Boot image. Thoughts? Cheers, Peter BTW, can we keep the discussion on the SoaS list please. _______________________________________________ SoaS mailing list [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/soas
