Installation Philosophy

[Les Mikesell]

On Thu, 2006-05-11 at 13:25, tfreeman at intel.digichem.net wrote:

> Ok. I'm through trying to be reasonable now. I'm curious if an install 
> routine could be added to FC which starts with an absolutely minimally 
> bootable system, to which only selected components get added at the choice 
> of the installer.

If you are internet-connected it makes more sense to let yum
install the particular add-ons for specialized uses. You
just tell it the packages you know you want to run and it
will pull in any needed dependencies automatically.  With
fedora it's almost certain that most of what you installed
from the CD was obsolete and will be replaced on the
first 'yum update' anyway.

> >From this "working" system, in one case, I want to have a headless server. 
> I need packages for samba, nfs, dhcp, MTA (postfix?), IMAP4 (dovecot?). 
> For the moment I'll ignore some utilities like nut, and ssh(d) which would 
> be excellent additions to the system. While installing X isn't going to  
> actively hurt anything, for a headless machine X is pure waste.

Don't forget that X is a client/server system.  It makes perfect
sense to install a headless server, yet manage it with GUI
programs that display on your desktop.

> Note that the package/capabilities list covers only one relatively unique 
> situation. Somebodyelses server could need a database server, but drop 
> dhcp. Or maybe add a sound streaming server and ldap server without file 
> shareing. And so forth.

Yes, yum will install exactly what you tell it.  The piece that
is possibly missing is a list of what some experienced person
has working together for the cases where an inexperienced person
wants to easily duplicate that exact functionality.

> My point isn't that FC can not be customized to this type level, but the 
> approach feels backwards to me. Packages need to be removed, or turned off 
> and removed to reduce the security exposure. A fair amount of background 
> knowledge is needed to do this reduction without hurting something.

I'm not sure how much more can be done to share the knowledge or
how safe it is to proceed by copying someone else without it,
but the list of packages seems to be the only thing you
need to accomplish what you ask here.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com