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 sloooow. 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.
