RE: Elks Distribution

Dan Olson
2002-05-29T23:44:21Z

> I hear what you are saying and I certainly intend to leave a
> lot of this sort of flexibility available but if you check out the
> goal of the project - I am looking for a pretty well automated
> process. Believe it or not I have had concerns, still, that
> things are too complicated for certain people. I remain
> focused on my goal but with an eye to the sort of comments
> that you have made.

Well, sure, I understand wanting to keep things simple. On the other
hand, you have to remember that the operating system in itself isn't
really simple, so at some point some sort of user knowledge is going to be
required.

> Alan had made some comments to me concerning the mini
> curses that is available to ELKS. I haven't followed this up
> yet but its in my todo list. I have also had comments that a
> shell script is more than sufficient. I may end up with a text
> or Curses install selection ?

I suppose you can do quite a bit with text, but it seems like some menuing
would be a nice thing. I honestly don't know the limitations of either.
I suppose some ANSI stuff could be added to make things look nice too. I
suppose at this point maybe text is simplest and most compatible??

> The hard drive partition issue has three key problems that
> need to be addressed. The first is how I identify and retain
> control of the ELKS partition during the install process.

Why? I've switch to different virtual terminals under Linux durring an
install, just to see how much drive space I was using. After the
partition is made, it's just a file dump, right??

> second concerns the controlling of multi-boot. Javier and
> Pascal have made a very useful contribution here. The

Well, that's beyond my knowledge, but I would think that a simple boot
loader would be somewhat generic and almost not even ELKS related. Should
I give LILO a try again? Maybe tonight if I have time.

> final issue is of producing the kernel to be installed which
> really relates specificallly to the point you make. The install
> set that I have at present will only install to /dev/bda1. The
> reason for that is that you have to actually build into the
> kernel the location of the system root. In email with Alan,
> yesterday, this was identified as an area where a change
> to core ELKS may be required. Namely to allow a
> configuration option outside of the kernel to indicate the
> location of root.

How does Linux handle that? Does it just look at /etc/fstab on the device
it booted from, and see where it says root is? Maybe it's a complex
system or something, but I know one kernel image will work with many
different root devices.

> Many Thanks for your input Dan. I very much appreciate it.

Thanks, and thanks for your work, a way to automate an install is
definetly something I'm in need of :)

Dan