The Distribution

[George Bonser <grep@oriole.sbay.org>]

Ok, folks. Here is a suggestion for how we should put together our first
concept demonstrator.  You have heard parts of this before but here is a
fairly complete picture of what I have in mind.  Please feel free to rip
this to shreads and help me to put it back together.

We build on the very base Debian install.   This is the 5 floppies that
get installed during the install phase or the portion of the CDROM install
where it reports that it is loading the base system. In short, it is
everything done prior to rebooting the system. 

After rebooting, rather than throw the user into dselect, it should ask a
few configuration questions.  For example:

What type of video card do you have?

1) Mono 
2) Color VGA
3) Color SVGA

Do you have a Multisync monitor?

1) Yes
2) No
3) What is multisync?

mouse type, keyboard type, etc.

This would dprovide the information needed to load a canned X installation
that would not require the user to run xf86config. These would be an
unaccellerated X server with fairly basic modes. The user will be told
that they can add performance later.

Then, a GUI PPP configurator would launch and the internet access set up.

Then the installation continues from CDROM, NFS, Disk, or FTP as usual

I would say that right now, our distribution consists of the basic install
and nothing more at this point.

George Bonser 
If NT is the answer, you didn't understand the question. (NOTE: Stolen sig)
http://www.debian.org
Debian/GNU Linux ... the maintainable operating system.