[CentOS-devel] LiveCD suggestion

Sat Jun 5 02:23:52 UTC 2010
R P Herrold <herrold at centos.org>

On Sat, 5 Jun 2010, Manuel Wolfshant wrote:

>> in addition to improving docs, it would also be quite cool to
>> pre-populate the questions asked by the netinstaller with same sane
>> defaults.

> As far as I have seen while being in #centos, most beginners' questions
> (in the context of netinstall) were more or less similar to "what should
> I put in the 'mirror' and 'path' fields ?". Can we patch anaconda so as
> to prepopulate those two without overloading any particular mirrors
> (maybe using somehow the output of mirrorlist ) ?

Anaconda is not Debian's netinstall approach, lacking retries, 
invisible remote archive failovers, and diagnostic logging 
comprehensible to said newbies. Additionally, Debian avoids 
much of the mirror skew issue by staging updates to a daily 
lump, and having much better 'apt-get update' detail coherency 
as a result.

The next question in #centos from beginner is 'why did my 
install across the internet fail' and

If they are only willing to D/L one CD, let it be CD 1, and 
devote effort to grafting in a 'minimal install' option tha 
has all dependencies at hand [more on this in a mement as to 
'6]

Otherwise you all are in the business of inventing a robust 
paralle local media install method beside anaconda

It's been done in upstream derived RPM space -- Greg Kurtzer's 
'cinch' for cAos was one, but that tool is suited for a very 
small class of installs at best

Also, as I read the '6 beta thinking from inside ['notting' as 
I recall], the single CD size installer is just too small, and 
CD images are on the way out

I am sure a local limited case installer can be done -- but 
what does it have to do with ending up with a system based on 
the upstream?

-- Russ herrold