On Wednesday 01 June 2011 16:56:07 Dave Martin wrote:
On Wed, Jun 01, 2011 at 03:36:47PM +0100, Wookey wrote:
+++ Arnd Bergmann [2011-06-01 16:11 +0200]:
On Wednesday 01 June 2011, Wookey wrote:
I absolutely agree that we should consequently think beyond image generation, but that doesn't necessarily mean that a CD image to perform an unattended installation is a better answer.
My main question to this is "install from where?".
I'd say the default case (at least for current hardware) is booting from SD or USB stick and installing from the network. (Which is how I install PCs these days too - it's a very long time since I got a CD out :-)).
Yes, me too.
but that doesn't necessarily mean that a CD image to perform an unattended installation is a better answer
I'm not sure I follow you here. Are you suggesting that there is some third way between a locally-bootable installer image and pre-built images? (In which case what - I don't see this), or just that CDs are no longer the default media (agreed).
One approach that seems to be getting more popular these days is to have a bootable system as a USB image, with a way to clone that installation to another drive. This is arguably a bit different from the classic installer where you boot a very small image (not made of regular packages but e.g. udeb instead of deb, or purely busybox based) that installs a system to the final destination from scratch.
If we can move the entire installation system to a ramfs on boot, we can unmount and free up the boot device, allowing the system to be installed in-place.
This is probably the main question: If we want an installer, should it be something that boots as an initramfs and is able to install in a very flexible way, or do we instead build a minimal image that basically includes everything needed to add more stuff through apt-get, possibly with a way to clone itself to another drive?
Arnd