[RULE] Re: Installing Fedora FC2 with Slinky -- lurker interest ...

[Bryan J. Smith]

[ Just a lurker commenting ... I may be way out of context.  Feel free
to smack me if I am. ]

On Tue, 2004-09-14 at 14:53, Franz Zahaurek wrote:
> The drawbacks of the present FC2 installation as far as I have noticed:
> *) composition of packages - that's a longtime term

>From the traffic I've seen Seth & co. are trying to unify a lot of the
packages and package lists.  Seth pegged it at no less than 5 different
package lists in FC2 in a recent posts.  Work seems to be progressing to
unify this around a single, YUM-centric model.

Frankly, I'd like to see an independent installer effort to use APT
(small-footprint) and, as an option maybe once swap enabled (?), Snaptic
(GTK+).  But that's getting ahead of myself (let alone volunteering
myself ;-).

BTW, any one know what Cobind uses (if anything)?

> *) ownership and permissions in .../dev - error
> *) the installation is fixed to cdrom   - error
> *) RPM-GPG-KEY is not recognized correctly - error
> *) the installed kernel is i568 while all rpms are i368 and besides it
>    does not boot with 8MB - this is sensless in slinky-context

I was under the impression that Red Hat never builds anything for i586. 
i586 (Pentium) optimizations can be a great disservice to most
processors, even Intel's own, hence why i686 (Pentium Pro) optimizations
are recommended.

>From what I've seen, Red Hat's current strategy seems to be optimize for
i686, but require only an i486, in most binaries with the .i386 tag. 
>From what I've seen, Fedora Core 2 still installs on only i486 ISA
compatible systems.

Alan Cox and I had a thread on the Fedora-Devel list a few months back
and it appears that just about everything produced in the last 6+ years
is at least i486 ISA compatible.  The i486 has numerous features that
are major benefits, like the TLB.

The only other consideration is for NPTL.  That requires the i686 kernel
(and i686 GLibC too?), as the i386 will not support it.  Only a few
packages require NPTL at this time.  But one I'm watching is Sleepycat
DB, which RPM uses.  I just hope a forthcoming RPM doesn't use it.

> I would suggest the following priorities to solve these and make the
> RULE-installation really usefull:
> 1) cleanup the errors
> 2) ashure, that the different installation methods realy work
> 3) bootstrap original rpm with busybox-rpm - don't know if this can work
> 4) free up most space on disk2 by dropping rpm.gz and replace it with a
>    suitable actual kernel for i386 (by now 2.6.8.1)
> 5) drop eject from the installation disks and use eject from FC2 (this
>    is not consistent if the installing is form cdrom)
> What do you think?  Please reference to the topics.

-- 
     Linux Enthusiasts call me anti-Linux.
   Windows Enthusisats call me anti-Microsoft.
 They both must be correct because I have over a
decade of experience with both in mission critical
environments, resulting in a bigotry dedicated to
 mitigating risk and focusing on technologies ...
           not products or vendors
--------------------------------------------------
Bryan J. Smith, E.I.         b.j.smith at ieee.org


_______________________________________________
Original home page of the RULE project: www.rule-project.org
Rule-list at rule-project.org
http://rita.choice-secure.com/mailman/listinfo/rule-list_rule-project.org