Hi Mike,
On Mon, 7 May 2007, Mike M. Volokhov wrote:
> On the past week I have to reinstall machines in our training center
> (my new job). Well, all machines looks very common thus g4u is exactly
> the tool what I need. Although I've heard a lot about g4u before, this
> was my first time experience.
>
> So, after preparing 16G partition on source machine I downloaded g4u
> to perform PXE-powered setup. Unfortunately, some problems immediately
> pursued me. There are.
>
> 1) g4u have no partitioning software (i.e. fdisk, please see also p.4
> below), and upoading 200G images (please note that my partition size is
> 16G) for the whole disk looks like an overkill for me. Also, I'd like
> to propose new {upload,slurp}layout programs, intended to deal with
> partition layouts. 'fdisk -S' may be used in this case.
>
> 2) While trying to rebuild the g4u from sources to include fdisk I
> found that G4U.MPACPI kernel doesn't compiles (you are already know
> this problem :-) While talking about compilation - followed by
> instructins on your site my workstation was gone to rebuild the whole
> world. But building g4u from src/distrib/i386/g4u is not much complex
> (if more complex at all), but saves a hell lot of time.
>
> 3) {slurp,upload}{disk,part} are almost the same program. As *nix user
> I often incorrectly tried to preform partition operations with
> slurpdisk utility. IMHO it would be better to merge *part into *disk
> and add disk/partition autodetection (if disk/part contains a digit at
> the end it's name, then 'd' should be appended).
>
> 4) Because of *disk/*part messing I've to reedit the command each time,
> but shell was compiled without editline. Yes, I understand the problem
> roots - in this case it will need three floppy disks instead of two. In
> order to solve this I'd recommend to create two g4u variants - GENERIC
> and TINY. For TINY you may drop lot of drivers and include smallest
> tools; this may allow to fit g4u just one floppy. GENERIC, in contrast,
> will fit three floppies, but will have all required tools and drivers.
>
> 5) While talking about g4u development: dot.profile contains ?()
> function, which cannot be properly used because '?' is the shell
> metacharacter. IMHO help() is completely enough.
>
> Well, because most of above is criticall for my work I go for it, but
> I'd like to see it included in further g4u releases.
>
> Any opinion?
You're right in most parts, as I've already said in our chat.
About #5, I've removed that already in my development version.
If you have scripts to contribute to backup & restore partition layout,
I'd be very happy to include that in g4u - It's something I wanted to add
for some time, but as you said, extended partitions make things
interesting.
I prefer not to have several versions of g4u now just to cut down on
floppy size. At least I haven't heared complaints about that yet - I can
only guess people mostly use the ISO these days. (I should dig my
webserver logs...)
Thank you for your feedback!
- Hubert
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express
Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take
control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now.
http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/
_______________________________________________
g4u-help mailing list
g4u-help@feyrer.de
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/g4u-help
