[Fedora-livecd-list] hdd installs from livecd patch - where?

[Jane Dogalt]

--- Jasper O'neal Hartline <jasperhartline at adelphia.net> wrote:

> Jane Dogalt wrote:
> 
> >I just noticed that fedora projects weekly says jasper provided a patch for
> the
> >hdd installs.  Was this a typo?  The link only points to a message about the
> >possibility of creating one, not an actual patch.
> >
> >  
> >
> I did go through the process of creating one, but it was very obtuse and 
> wouldn't have been accepted
> by Anaconda dev. The problems lie within Anaconda, if you would like I 
> can briefly go over them in a message
> to the list, perhaps someone wants to help submit patches to Anaconda 
> dev and/or file RFEs?
 
Yes.

I'm guessing what we're talking about here is something akin to whats on the
ubuntu live desktop cd, as the 'install' icon on the desktop (haven't actually
clicked it yet, so I can only speculate as to what it does).

The basic gist would seem to be an anaconda that was happy running under a
window in X (like kadischi currently uses, but not rootpath, i.e. it does do
partitioning, but like rootpath in that it is more hands-off WRT the running
system).

An alternative to that (and I think both alternatives have their usefulness)
would be something which just does GUI partitioning, and then installs the
livecd system itself to the harddrive (mkfs's the new partition, copies the
squashfs contents, undoes the changes that were made specifically for the
livecd environment).

A third alternative which I'd like to see is the "rebootless installer livecd".
I.e.-

livecd system is implemented as a read-only ext3 filesystem image,
copy-on-write is provided by devicemapper snapshot using a sparse ext3 image
file created in tmpfs, and both of those things being devicemapper mirrors
which are initially created and used as broken.  Then if the user decides to
install to disk, the mirrors are unbroken/fixed by duping them onto the
harddisk the user configured to use.  Then they are rebroken from the cd&tmpfs,
and what you are left with is the livecd environment migrated onto the
harddisk, and a fully usable system, with ejectable/usable cddrive, which has
been fully installed without the need to ever reboot.

(yes, I'm going off the deep end of ambition again...)

-jdog


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