[1742] in athena10
[Debathena] #160: Live CD needs improvement for general consumption
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Debathena Trac)
Tue Mar 17 12:11:35 2009
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From: "Debathena Trac" <debathena@MIT.EDU>
Cc: debathena@mit.edu
To: jdreed@mit.edu
Date: Tue, 17 Mar 2009 16:11:22 -0000
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#160: Live CD needs improvement for general consumption------------------------+---------------------------------------------------
Reporter: jdreed | Owner:
Type: enhancement | Status: new
Priority: major | Keywords:
------------------------+--------------------------------------------------- I finally got around to playing with the Live CD. It's a great start, but
it needs some improvement before it's ready for general consumption:
- Networking: Logins fail miserably if the machine isn't registered. I
realize this is a function of our environment, but since we're aiming this
CD at new Debathena users, we should probably figure out a way to do
something clever if the machine isn't registered for DHCP (a zenity dialog
would be fine, prompting the user for a static IP would be awesome).
What would be clever would be if the livecd did some sort of check before
starting the greeter. In a dhreg situation, all DNS requests return an A
record for 10.72.0.47, which is nic.mit.edu's other interface. So perhaps
the livecd could try to fetch, say, http://debathena.mit.edu/livecd.txt,
and parse the output. If it it matches what is expected, then they have
network. If it's a 404 error, or some other page, it means they're
actually talking to nic.mit.edu. And if it can't connect, then there's no
networking at all.
- Partitioner in GUI installer: The partitioner does not understand LVM.
As most Linux distributions have been defaulting to LVM for a while, this
means a user cannot, for example, replace an RHEL installation without
nuking their entire volgroup. I realize this is an upstream problem, but
this is kind of a dealbreaker, since the tty mode partitioner (available
via a PXE install) understands LVM just fine. The user should at least be
informed of this before trying to install. Perhaps the "install" utility
on the desktop can be wrapped with something which warns the user what
will and won't work.
- Installation choices: Ideally, we'd give users the option of installing
everything they can install from the installer script (except -cluster).
However, in the short term, -standard and -workstation are fine. When we
rename stuff, we should figure out if the latter will still mean
-workstation or if we should change it to -graphical-login.
-- Ticket URL: <http://debathena.mit.edu/~debathena/trac/trac.fcgi/ticket/160>Debathena <http://debathena.mit.edu/>MIT Debian-Athena Project
