Suggestions for Installer improvements?

Snowman · 2005-10-24 20:08:34

arooaroo wrote:

Snowman wrote:
And, of course, an iso (CD) might be useful for systems that don't have floppy drives like some modern laptops.
Surely you mean most modern laptops, not some?!

No, I meant my modern laptop. Seriously tough, it depends on how you define modern. My 2-3 year old laptop had one. My current (bought this summer) laptop has no floppy drive. That's not something I checked for when shopping for it so I don't know how widespread it is. Now with CD/DVD burners and USB/firewire devices, the floppy drives will soon be eliminated completely...

CyberTron · 2005-10-26 06:23:46

Snowman wrote:

arooaroo wrote:
Snowman wrote:
And, of course, an iso (CD) might be useful for systems that don't have floppy drives like some modern laptops.
Surely you mean most modern laptops, not some?!
No, I meant my modern laptop. Seriously tough, it depends on how you define modern. My 2-3 year old laptop had one. My current (bought this summer) laptop has no floppy drive. That's not something I checked for when shopping for it so I don't know how widespread it is. Now with CD/DVD burners and USB/firewire devices, the floppy drives will soon be eliminated completely...

I agree to that as well, my laptop bought 2 years ago, didn't have floppy, only a usb-memory But I don't use floppies anyway

android · 2005-11-01 20:33:51

Hi All,

I think many of us have had problems during some big upgrade (kernel changes, applications, package dependancies, etc).

Regarding partitioning during install, I was thinking of a system with 3, maybe 4 "system" partitions and the rest of the disk dedicated to /home. Then a major upgrade could be installed into one system partition without disrupting the already running one.

This could prevent that frantic three of four day period after a big upgrade before getting everything happy again (this is what it seems to take me anyway). It would also make it possible to keep several versions of arch installed.

I know this can be cobbled together now by the experienced uber user, but why not build this kind of inherent backup/fault tolerance into the default install?

Hard disks today are typically > 80G. This is a LOT of disk space, a complete system only needs 1G or so.

Just my latest daydream...

android

biryoku · 2005-11-02 19:26:31

Here's a really newb idea, but what if we got rid of hotplug?

The installer could use hwd to find all the modules needed for the system to boot, and the system could just load those modules, instead of doing that hotplug search thing every time it boots. It would greatly reduce boot time, and there could be a "new hardware" script to make hwd rescan and load new modules.

If I am completely misunderstanding the function of hotplug, feel free to laugh at me and ignore this, but I think it'd be great if we could get rid of hotplug to drastically reduce boot time. A needed-modules-search seems like something that should only be needed during the install, or when you put in new hardware.

Gullible Jones · 2005-11-02 20:24:07

Don't worry, I made this same mistake... uDev using Hotplug for hotplugging, so Hotplug is needed, unless you're using nDevFS.

(Yes, I'm asking if anyone knows how... :? )

jakob · 2005-11-02 20:51:03

Gullible Jones wrote:

Don't worry, I made this same mistake... uDev using Hotplug for hotplugging, so Hotplug is needed, unless you're using nDevFS.
(Yes, I'm asking if anyone knows how... :? )

So you want to say if plugging on a usb stick while running the system is only sensible when using hotplug?

jerrym · 2005-11-04 12:42:46

not sure if this has been mentioned before, but the menu based installer is good, but when you come back to the main menu to continue the install it defaults to the top selection. can the script be made to go to the next item on the list after the previous one is finished? for example after i select packages to install and go back to the main menu, the next item on the list, install packages, should be selected by default. it is not.

Gullible Jones · 2005-11-04 20:36:08

Hellwoofa: I'm saying that udev might not work properly without hotplug.

Explosivo · 2005-11-05 17:48:39

Two things that annoyd me during the basic installation:

1) I couldn't mount my existing fat Partition to access some backups of old config files that would have been quite useful and that would have saved the time I wasted, booting Knoppix and checking what I wanted to see.

 mount -t vfat /dev/discs/disc0/part5 /mnt/daten

simply told me, the device didn't exist (although it obviously existed in /dev)

And the installer itself also didn't give me the possibility to set a mount point for the existing fat-Partition (had to that manually later on)

2) The extremly minimalistic set of tools provided by the installation CD apart form the installer: no "links", no lspci, no manpages, no hdparm ....
If someone wants to check out some info on the Internet he simply will have to go to another Computer or abort the installation.

I think the Live-CD doesn't deserve to be called "rescue disc" if can't mount FAT-Partition with it!
On that terms the Minimal Live CD of Gentoo is very good - but it lacks an installer
Arch already has an installer ... but it needs to be more versatile!

jftaylor21 · 2005-11-05 17:54:26

I don't know if this was mentioned before or if it is on there now, but hwd would be nice to have on it. It comes in handy when I am installing on another person's computer and I don't know their hardware.

android · 2005-12-12 01:28:50

Set Default swap partition size according to RAM size detected.

I let the 256M swap partition default slip by me on my last round of installations on a couple of workstations with 1G of RAM.

/proc/swaps shows swap size 262576 and used 262536 almost all the time. Seems this should be a little more empty? I have experienced occassional severe thrashing on these machines with kswapd using effectively all of cpu.

ALSO, I still vote for separate partitions by default for several complete installed versions plus one BIG partition for a common /home.

This could REALLY take the anxiety out of those major upgrades by allowing them to be installed separately and confirmed working while leaving the old version intact.

One other thought: Is this really the right place for this post? Is anyone still reading a 2 1/2 year old thread?

Are you out there apeiro? Do you read me? if so, thanx again...

android

hotsauce · 2006-01-02 17:49:36

jftaylor21 wrote:

I don't know if this was mentioned before or if it is on there now, but hwd would be nice to have on it. It comes in handy when I am installing on another person's computer and I don't know their hardware.

I second the motion. Would have been really helpful for me.

xaos5 · 2006-01-03 06:27:23

I believe a better partitioning tool would be nice, I never did like cfdisk. Something maybe like debian where you don't have to go out of the main install gui to partition.

mindtriggerz · 2006-01-03 21:39:53

It seems that hotplug has been replaced by uDev as of today, so that should be taken care of. Also, the rescue part of the CD needs to be improved because it has no tools! (irssi would be good to include)
How about we base it off of Archie, it seems to work well.

nirvanix · 2006-01-04 00:03:08

I believe that the .71 install cd still omits to mention the addition of 'noinitrd ro' to the command used when you want to boot into an existing arch setup. I tried to do boot into my existing system from the cd using the command specified and it didn't work unless I added the piece I mentioned.

xaos5 · 2006-01-05 19:57:25

including grub on the cd would also be awesome for recovery purposes.

pseudomind · 2006-01-06 08:45:32

You know, sometimes i make an install and i know that it has an nvidia graphics card in it... It would be wonderful if i could install some proprietary drivers even if they would be outdated a few months from now. Its just that the 'nv' driver sucks so badly that it makes installing xorg and a window manager during a clean install almost useless. I mean if i wanted to just wait to get that stuff functional during the first bootup then i would just run pacman for all the nececery tools.. but if this cd is going to be useful for installing packages on a computer that might not have internet access then it should have some decent video drivers on it because it wont be of much use in a gui mode if it cant acheive res modes higher than 640x480. I know im being nit-picky here... but this is already a great distro and there are no more major complaints left for me to complain. So yes, that is a compliment in a roundabout way!

alancooney · 2006-01-08 11:29:22

It would be really cool to have qtparted (http://qtparted.sourceforge.net/) so that we can resize partitions on install. Vector linux has this, so you could probably ask them how they did it. Or you could use FIPS (http://www.igd.fhg.de/~aschaefe/fips/) but I've never used that one. Oh, and theres ntfsresize (http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.html) aswell.

One thing that the Vector linux installation didn't have was a warning to defragment your disk before doing this.

Gullible Jones · 2006-01-08 15:22:34

QTParted is out, it's graphical. Anything in the installer has to work without X.

(Of course, Archie could include a graphical partition manager, if it doesn't already...)

deficite · 2006-01-08 18:06:06

You could always just use parted, the CLI version.

xaos5 · 2006-01-09 05:26:03

pseudomind wrote:

You know, sometimes i make an install and i know that it has an nvidia graphics card in it... It would be wonderful if i could install some proprietary drivers even if they would be outdated a few months from now. Its just that the 'nv' driver sucks so badly that it makes installing xorg and a window manager during a clean install almost useless. I mean if i wanted to just wait to get that stuff functional during the first bootup then i would just run pacman for all the nececery tools.. but if this cd is going to be useful for installing packages on a computer that might not have internet access then it should have some decent video drivers on it because it wont be of much use in a gui mode if it cant acheive res modes higher than 640x480. I know im being nit-picky here... but this is already a great distro and there are no more major complaints left for me to complain. So yes, that is a compliment in a roundabout way!

This is probably not include as default because license agreements (just a guess!). the nv driver isn't at all bad compared to microsoft windows without the nvidia drivers installed.

thegnu · 2006-01-11 18:33:19

pseudomind wrote:

You know, sometimes i make an install and i know that it has an nvidia graphics card in it... It would be wonderful if i could install some proprietary drivers even if they would be outdated a few months from now.

You could download the package, and add it to the CD manually. Or have an extra packages CD. I know, extra work, but if you do this sort of thing often enough, it would be valuable.

nirvanix · 2006-01-16 22:40:16

On the .71 install menu, if you use nano to edit the config files, the command keystrokes (like <CTL> O to write the file) don't seem to work, or don't appear to work).

raskolnikov · 2006-03-06 19:28:50

Don't know if it has already been said, but it would be nice to have a netinst iso (like the base one, but without all the packages). Just downloaded again 0.7.1 iso (I use only CD-RW for linux, and blanked the one I burned last month ), and I find it sad to have 138M of unused packages...

sodface · 2006-03-06 19:47:13

raskolnikov wrote:

Don't know if it has already been said, but it would be nice to have a netinst iso (like the base one, but without all the packages). Just downloaded again 0.7.1 iso (I use only CD-RW for linux, and blanked the one I burned last month ), and I find it sad to have 138M of unused packages...

Minimax is only 32mb and includes the Arch installer. I did an FTP install with it. I had a few problems outlined here but easily overcome and maybe more due to me than anything else.

Arch Linux

#76 2005-10-24 20:08:34

Re: Suggestions for Installer improvements?

#77 2005-10-26 06:23:46

Re: Suggestions for Installer improvements?

#78 2005-11-01 20:33:51

Re: Suggestions for Installer improvements?

#79 2005-11-02 19:26:31

Re: Suggestions for Installer improvements?

#80 2005-11-02 20:24:07

Re: Suggestions for Installer improvements?

#81 2005-11-02 20:51:03

Re: Suggestions for Installer improvements?

#82 2005-11-04 12:42:46

Re: Suggestions for Installer improvements?

#83 2005-11-04 20:36:08

Re: Suggestions for Installer improvements?

#84 2005-11-05 17:48:39

Re: Suggestions for Installer improvements?

#85 2005-11-05 17:54:26

Re: Suggestions for Installer improvements?

#86 2005-12-12 01:28:50

Re: Suggestions for Installer improvements?

#87 2006-01-02 17:49:36

Re: Suggestions for Installer improvements?

#88 2006-01-03 06:27:23

Re: Suggestions for Installer improvements?

#89 2006-01-03 21:39:53

Re: Suggestions for Installer improvements?

#90 2006-01-04 00:03:08

Re: Suggestions for Installer improvements?

#91 2006-01-05 19:57:25

Re: Suggestions for Installer improvements?

#92 2006-01-06 08:45:32

Re: Suggestions for Installer improvements?

#93 2006-01-08 11:29:22

Re: Suggestions for Installer improvements?

#94 2006-01-08 15:22:34

Re: Suggestions for Installer improvements?

#95 2006-01-08 18:06:06

Re: Suggestions for Installer improvements?

#96 2006-01-09 05:26:03

Re: Suggestions for Installer improvements?

#97 2006-01-11 18:33:19

Re: Suggestions for Installer improvements?

#98 2006-01-16 22:40:16

Re: Suggestions for Installer improvements?

#99 2006-03-06 19:28:50

Re: Suggestions for Installer improvements?

#100 2006-03-06 19:47:13

Re: Suggestions for Installer improvements?

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