[Gnoppix-devel] Installation Tool (Was: RE: GNOPPIX "Linux Boot Screen")

[Raphael Schmid]

Hey All,

just another thing. There's something else that struck me
about your website, but only now it came to me that it was
your stated intent of developing a GUI installation tool.

Well, as it happens to be, there's this screenshot:
        http://images.freshmeat.net/screenshots/40291.png

The thing is called "The Installer", is a mere ~1200 LOC at
the moment, and is written in C# (if it sucks, see it as a
prototype, if it doesn't, it might actually become useful).
Rest assured - the license displayed is BSD.

Now I don't know if you've already started with an installer
of your own, or how far you've come. In any case, would you
be interested in making this a joing effort? I do think the
goals are not so far apart.

        - Provide a user-friendly installation tool for Linux
          distributions.

        - Make it also developer-friendly, so virtually every
          woman and every man can develop a Linux distribution
          and use this tool for installing it.

        - Have the tool work after a principle that first it
          tries to do any configuration work by itself, and
          only in case of "doubt", when an error occured, or
          when a descision can't be made automatically asks
          the user.

        - Use a plugin mechanism for the package installation
          part. That way, you could use very diverse sources.
          Examples include simple tar balls, RPM packages,
          Debian packages, loopback filesystems, compressed
          loopback filesystems, and anything from a harddisk
          over CD-ROMs to FTP servers as media containers.

        - My 'dream process' would involve booting from a CD
          and asking the user as soon as possible whether 
          s/he'd like to run a live system or install the OS
          to his or her computer.

        - Last but not least, on some systems using a GUI for
          installation can be impractical, or even impossible.
          The original idea had been to have different frontend
          programs (GTK, NCurses, ...). Now there's Cursed GTK
          (http://zemljanka.sourceforge.net/cursed/). Makes
          things much easier.

The selfish part is that I'm not studying software develop-
ment at a university but by books and pestering people only.
So The Installer would greatly benefit from more experienced
programmers looking at it's design. GNOPPIX would benefit
from two more people helping out with it's installation tool
and some work already having been done.

Thank you for your time!

        Best Regards, Raphael J. Schmid