HD Installer Enhancement

[eadz]

This section would seem to be for those people, like me, who have ideas but no knowledge to execute them.

Correct. ( although if you DO have knowledge to excute them it's still a good idea to post them here for discussion - take the ~/etc/ thread for example )

It is set up, for people who have ideas to submit them. If they have the skill/means/time to impliment the idea, i'm sure they will. But usually its for discussion about is this a good idea, or how to do it.

Saying "do it yourself" is not helpful. Some of the ideas are "adding a program" or other things, which is fine. These ideas will hopefully be picked up sometime and implimented.

[qa1433]

Personally I think this is a great idea. I am sure somebody has done it already. I am so tired of folk in the idea's or suggestions forums (not just here but in others also) stating RTFM or go do it youself.

Don't get me wrong, the masters of Linux think bad of us newbs.

However, with a distro focused at regular Windows (Hopefully X Windows users) users. Therefore these type of suggestions are very valuable and usefull.
just my 2 cents.

[Alextreme]

Useful enough to be implemented

I'm busy on a gtk2-installer for my knoppix-based distro morphix (but it could easily be adapted back for knoppix), you can download the source+precompiled bin at http://am.xs4all.nl/morphix/installer.

Note that this is a trial-version, all it does is print it's actions to stdout so you can try it out (learned that the hard way ) without actually installing or changing anything except for cfdisk. Also, it's just a begin, i've yet to test it propper or include it.

And, well, morphix may not be knoppix, but what do you think are good requirements for an installer? Yes, it's just a plain copy of the CD (uncompressed), it sets up lilo, and i'm thinking about a better partition-prog, but i'm not someone that has problems with a normal debian install. What would you find easier? How far does the expertise go of a casual Windows user? Can you let him partition his harddisk?

I also thought about starting a topic in the hdd install forum, but seeing this topic i'd like to know what the 'newbs' think. Speak now and i might even adapt the installer accordingly

[qa1433]

I think it would be a great idea!

[god]

the way i see it, the stages of window-->linux conversion go as follow for the easiest time of it....
1. Live CD
2. Install a copy of the live CD as a Dual boot (the close the HD installation to the live CD the better. The easier, the better)
3. Possible drop of windows completely.

I agree that some people come across as lazy people wanting others to do the work, but some of them want someone to HELP them do it. Show them how, teach them. Some of the people you tell to do it yourself have tried, or need help with an idea, and it is not always a request to have it done for them....

[Alextreme]

Hmm, dual booting. I think the debian installer has a nice lilo-setup script for that, detecting all window partitions, i'll chuck it in...

[aloneinthevoid]

Has anyone looked at the possibility of using PGI, the Progeny Graphical Installer to install Knoppix to a H.D.? Personally, I had no problem with knx-hdinstall, but I've done a number of Debian installs; I understand that WIN users are intimidated by the CLI and PGI is very user-friendly, it's open-source, and it's the leader (AFAIK) to be the default Debian graphical installer (one of the goals for Sarge to become stable is a graphical installer). IMHO, the more people who are able to install Knoppix to a hard drive, the better, and PGI is a top-notch application for that task.

[Alextreme]

I have looked into it, and might snipe a few ideas. If you have some time over check out www.morphix.org, the 0.3 version has the GTK2 installer (try out light, it's an easy download )

However, i must sniffle the rumor that PGI would be included as the default installer. You are right that a lot of work is being done on the default debian-installer, but this is not PGI! PGI might be a nice alternative, but Debian is all about supporting multiple platforms. That, and that there still are people installing over a serial link

[aloneinthevoid]

I have looked into it, and might snipe a few ideas. If you have some time over check out www.morphix.org, the 0.3 version has the GTK2 installer (try out light, it's an easy download )

However, i must sniffle the rumor that PGI would be included as the default installer. You are right that a lot of work is being done on the default debian-installer, but this is not PGI! PGI might be a nice alternative, but Debian is all about supporting multiple platforms. That, and that there still are people installing over a serial link

Yeah, I was given to understand that the multi-platform aspect was the place where PGI drops the ball, but I'd have to argue that in the case of a Knoppix install, it's likely that the person doing the install would be new to Linux. My concern would be that the old "Linux is too damned hard to Install" be a hangup to prevent WINusers who like Knoppix (or any derivative) from installing to a hard drive; it's also fairly unlikely that a new user would be installing to a Sun/SPARC.

[David Douthitt]

the way i see it, the stages of window-->linux conversion go as follow for the easiest time of it....
1. Live CD
2. Install a copy of the live CD as a Dual boot (the close the HD installation to the live CD the better. The easier, the better)
3. Possible drop of windows completely

I agree. As a staunch UNIX/Linux user for a long time, I wanted to see if I could use it for regular daily use as a desktop - and especially since I don't know all the ins and outs of the Linux desktop.

This is changing rapidly. First I installed SuSE 8.1 Professional onto one of my systems with the full complement of user goodies (instead of just servers). Then a friend at work showed me Knoppix. He never got his CD back (he let me have it when I begged... )

Now I've been running with Knoppix for several weeks, and have found everything generally be tiptop.

In the case of pitching in, I just might do that. Of course, I've my own Linux distribution to think about - go to http://leaf.sf.net and look for Oxygen.

Anyway - about the hard drive install... I just did it (wiped out Solaris 8...) and only had a few troubles. First, the Solaris partition freaked out cfdisk - but the hdinstall handled it very well indeed.

The biggest trouble was that it doesn't seem to document the fact that the install is designed for loading everything to / on a single partition. I routinely set up /boot, /, /usr, /var, and /tmp - but that didn't work here. In this case, I only set up /boot and /, and then had to:

cd /boot ; find . | cpio -pmvd /mnt/roothd

or similar. Not a big deal, but certainly can be a trap for a passing weary traveler.

Also, it asks for passwords for knoppix and for root - but in the original "text" window. If you're not expecting it, you could be momentarily confused until you discover it.

It would also be nice to "extract" the Knoppix-isms and replace them with the original Debian setup - but that may be straying into the "Knoppix as a graphical Debian install" topic too much.