Re: storm linux
On Fri, 9 Jul 1999, Joey Hess wrote:
> * Starts with a boot prompt (lilo I think), with a big colorful login banner.
Yep, lilo.
> * Boots up into a menu. It tries to detect your mouse, this presumably
> succeeds if you have a normal serial mouse. I had to back up a step and
> tell it to autodetect my pcmcia mouse and move the mouse around for it to
> detect it.
Great. Actually the mouse detection is the weakest part(read not
heavily tested). This part and and the hardware detection are
the parts that we are really looking at. Oviously this is
hard to do in house.
> * Auto-detects your cd drive, and monitor and video card. Did a good job here.
We're also looking at auto kernel compilation in the future.
For example if a PPro is detected the correct .config settings
would be written to /usr/src/linux/.config and so on
for scsi, etc. This is an area where I think colaberation
with everyone: debian, redhat, corel, etc should be explored.
We are looking at developing an online db of such data
that could be updated by everyone and avail to everyone.
The advantages of such a db does not need to be emunerated.
> * Asks if you want to go into graphical mode. If so, it starts up icewm with
> a pretty background (see the screenshots on their web site). If not, it
> does all the following steps in a text based ui. They've abstracted things
> so the same backend is used for each.
> * Goes through partitioning, timezone selection, etc.
> * Presents a short list of groups of packages they you can chose to install.
> * Installs them non-interactively, with two progress bars and a time
> remaining display. It seems to skip configuring the packages, they arn't
> allowed to ask any questions.
The install just unpacks the pkgs. Any questions are asked on reboot.
We do not believe that pkgs should ask questions interactively.
Any pkgs to be included in storm linux will be re-pkged to
give reasonable defaults and given a "storm-" prefix.
If there are no resonable defaults then the install will
give the most secure settings and not enable any service.
For example storm-sendmail does not start sendmail nor does it
configure mail as there are no reasonable defaults.
A script is written to /var/storm-unconfigured/storm-sendmail/TODO
(if I remember correctly) that sill configure sendmail.
This is the only way I have determined to solve the situation.
> * Reboots.
>
> At this point, it failed to detect the scsi controller it had found fine
> before, and didn't boot. So I can't say what it's like once installed. I'll
> try again and follow up on this.
BUG. Thanks I'll note that.
>
> It's not as slick as the new caldera install, though I'd say it was heavily
> influenced by it.
Actually we were quite far along in development belore 2.2 came out.
It really wasn't a consideration.
The caldera install is quite nice, actually. It doesn't install
a debian system, though! :> Also storm linux will always be
free. Caldera is not.
COAS is a nice system as well. Unfortunately I don't think it
follows the UNIX philoshophy -- Emalgamating small tools
to accomplish a task. SAS allows you to do that.
+---------------------------------+-------------------------------------+
| R Garth Wood | Storm Linux: Taking Linux by storm. |
| Stormix Technologies Inc. | www.stormix.com |
| Senior UNIX Developer | |
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