(need perl scripter) draklive install and low-ram machines.

[Hootiegibbon]

As some may know I am playing with making an iso that is (in part) touted toward older/lower ram machines, he Lowest RAM that repeatedly installs with ease and without issue is 112megs on a Pentium3.

I suspect it will install on even lower RAM  machines but for a RAM usage bottleneck that happens shortly after draklive-install starts right after the /user/media (iirc) line if launched via CLI

Now I have put some thought into a couple of potential solutions, first would be the use of compcache, although I am not sure if there would be any gain on a machine with 64megs of ram to start with (64megs is my idealistc install target, witha GUI installation it may be closer to 80 megs in reality), unless I was able to have draklive-install lunch with compcache providing a little boost as it his the bottleneck...

The other option I could think of would be to have draklive-install make ncurses calls instead of gtk? I have no idea how this would be implemented or if it is possible. certainly booting the wmii iso into runlevel 3 eats about 40megs of ram and adding X on top another 16-20 megs so having a ncurses installer option would take a lot out of the equation and make PCLinuxOS installable on nealy any i686 machine - the minimum spec's fall dramatically.

Some have asked me why try and install on such low RAM - my answer is scalability , it may be handy to be able to install PCLinuxOS on a machine to act as a client to another (such as a thin client) the other reason is that there are plenty of pentium2 machines out there - our kernel does well on these machines so lets make it easier and  more comfortable for the user, if they don't like WMii as an interface they could install another WM after install, the main point is to ensure at all the apps used are 'standard PClinuxOS applications' so whatever the solution (if there is one) it will be avaialable for all to use.

So i guess the point of this post is...

are either of the two options above possible? (preference to an ncurses version if possible)

Thanks for your time in reading,

Jase

[AndrzejL]

+1 to the text install idea!

draklive-install-text would rock! Hootiegibbon - the WMII iso is fantastic. Very alternative. Very light. Very very good. KDE4 iso is SUPER SWEET... but has no chance to run on 112 mb of ram... Please understand the need of the alternate iso for the notsonew machines. Hootiegibbons iso is the lightest iso I have ever tried.

Please can someone write / create a text mode installer for PCLinuxOS?

Regards.

Andy

[rubentje1991]

That would be great!
=> going to play a little with an old IBM-computer soon (older than me I think  )

[AndrzejL]

Yeah - guys - is there any scripter who would be willing to do this?

I can't code at all... but it would be great to see this going... So far the only limitation for installation on the machine with less then 112 MB of RAM is the current install script.

If we could have the text based installation as alternative... possibilities would be much greater...

I know I have few machines that I could install pclinuxos on if they were capable of installing it...

Andy

[rafih]

+1 for the text installation script

[tofo1]

+1

[daniel]

I'm not sure, what is a text installation script?

[AndrzejL]

It would be something that will install PCLinuxOS without ANY X server running - lets say even in runlevel 3.

Regards.

Andy

[rubentje1991]

It would be something that will install PCLinuxOS without ANY X server running - lets say even in runlevel 3.

Regards.

Andy

so that there isn't any need of starting a X server during installation
=> necessary for pc's with a very small RAM memory.... (= old pc's)

[gseaman]

Most of the drake tools can work in text mode. It should be possible with the same existing libraries, but if I remember right, we don't have a lot of perl coders. 

Galen

[Neal ManBear]

Most of the drake tools can work in text mode. It should be possible with the same existing libraries, but if I remember right, we don't have a lot of perl coders. 

Galen

About 2 or 3.

[Hootiegibbon]

Most of the drake tools can work in text mode. It should be possible with the same existing libraries, but if I remember right, we don't have a lot of perl coders. 

Galen

About 2 or 3.

Thats 2 or 3 people that have wayy more talent than I  - any takers on this? - convert the live-install script to ncurses? - or perhaps somthing else?

Hopefully

Jase

[daniel]

i'm not fit on perl, sorry, and ncurses not see at this time 

[Hootiegibbon]

Draklive-install is not a PCLOS inhouse script.  It comes from Mandriva.  They've got the best config tools in the world IMO.  We can modify them to suit ourselves, but wouldn't it be better to write our own?

If we re-write or patch their tools, all our hours of work would be wiped out and overwritten on their next upgrade.  We're not talking about just an evening's work here.  LOL
We need our own packages, which is major work, but doable me thinks.

The possibility of an in-house PCLinuxOS install script? - that would be very very cool and somewhat Ideal

I appreciate that its not an easy task, but one that would incresae the scalability of PCLinuxOS and its various excellent iso images.

Jase

[Neal ManBear]

Draklive-install is not a PCLOS inhouse script.  It comes from Mandriva.  They've got the best config tools in the world IMO.  We can modify them to suit ourselves, but wouldn't it be better to write our own?

If we re-write or patch their tools, all our hours of work would be wiped out and overwritten on their next upgrade.  We're not talking about just an evening's work here.  LOL
We need our own packages, which is major work, but doable me thinks.

The possibility of an in-house PCLinuxOS install script? - that would be very very cool and somewhat Ideal

I appreciate that its not an easy task, but one that would incresae the scalability of PCLinuxOS and its various excellent iso images.

Jase

+1 If it's doable, lets do it.