RE: SEUL: Installations

[Juhana Siren <jsiren@pc164178.oulu.fi>]

On 27-Jun-97 Greg Bell wrote:
>would then use a preselected series of pacakages and do an ftp
>get/installation (never tried one of those, what is the speed of a
>installation compared to a download??) of those pre-selected packages

On a 10 MB connection the time taken to install an RPM directly via FTP is
about equal to that of downloading the package. Plus the package itself
doesn't stick around eating disk space - it's installed "on the fly", from
a temporary file. It's considerably faster than first downloading and then
installing. I install all my RPMs either like this or from CD. It's just a
matter of substituting a URL for the filename.

>does not mean limit a user to only those preselected packages but if the
>user wants to add different programs say for instance Tcl/Tk then the
>download script that the installation program runs could be modified but
>that is for a more advance user and alas must wait until such time as
>the prototype SEUL has been completed and evaluated.

RedHat's GLINT is otherwise fine, but it could be developed a bit further
to include an FTP client that could be used to browse the remote site to
find the appropriate directory. It also has some annoying bugs and a tendency
to crash without saying a word.

BTW, I installed TkDesk on my computer. It's simply marvellous. I think it 
should be included in the default desktop. It's easy to configure, looks good,
and if something goes wrong, _it tells you what it was_. Or at least does its 
best to find the problem. I've struggled with the config files of fvwm, fvwm2,
Afterstep, Freedom Desktop, olvwm and mlvwm, and this is definitely simpler than
any of those. I strongly recommend trying it. I also figure it wouldn't be too 
hard to make it configure itself, i.e. add new software to the menus 
automatically. Or, perhaps the package installer could ask a question like "Do 
you wish to include this program in the desktop menus?" - if yes, it would enter
some kind of a menu editor where you could simply click the poin where you wish
the new entry to be. Obviously, this wouldn't be done during the initial
installation, but when installing new software packages.
-- 
Juhana Siren - Juhana.Siren@oulu.fi - http://rieska.oulu.fi/~jsiren/
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