installer shortcoming in (all?) distros

[DaveR]

OK, I'm running Puppy (Puppeee ...) from CD or USB stick and I've finally got it beat into shape where its fully functional and I install it. The resulting install doesn't have any inkling of the all the work I've invested - its brain dead! And it isn't just Puppy that has the problem, I haven't seen one single installer that makes a "good" installation from a running liveCD.

My specific issues are display/video, sound, networking all the really difficult to configure stuff as well as simple things like a left handed mouse.

Why can't/don't installers take note of the specific configuration and install with that configuration?

Why do I have to lie to the Puppeee installer about my 701's flash drive? Why can't it make a full install to anything but IDE drives?

Dave Rowell

[RetroTechGuy]

OK, I'm running Puppy (Puppeee ...) from CD or USB stick and I've finally got it beat into shape where its fully functional and I install it. The resulting install doesn't have any inkling of the all the work I've invested - its brain dead! And it isn't just Puppy that has the problem, I haven't seen one single installer that makes a "good" installation from a running liveCD.

My specific issues are display/video, sound, networking all the really difficult to configure stuff as well as simple things like a left handed mouse.

Why can't/don't installers take note of the specific configuration and install with that configuration?

Why do I have to lie to the Puppeee installer about my 701's flash drive? Why can't it make a full install to anything but IDE drives?

Dave Rowell

I personally am a real fan of frugal installs (pupsaves). The migrating the setup to a new machine (or flash drive) is as simple as copying the unmounted pupsave file...

It sounds as if you're trying to move a frugal install into a full install on the HDD. I suspect that will not work trivially, as you have the UFS to deal with (and copying a mounted Linux filesystem is generally a bad idea). It is possible if you perform a "cp -adir" at the "/" level of your mounted system, onto the HDD it might work, but I wouldn't hold my breath on that (the options should prevent it from propagating down the symlinks, preventing a recursive overflow on your HDD, but I don't know what other things will get crunched)...

If you have a working frugal on your flash, why don't you perform a frugal install on the HDD, then copy your good pupsave onto the HDD (give it a new name). The next boot it will ask you which pupsave to load, and you select your highly customized one.

Re: Installers. I've run and installed a number of Linux systems over the years. Puppy is far and away the best/easiest installer I've seen (and I have played with Debian, Slackware, Ubuntu, ...). Indeed, it is also easier (and FAR faster) than performing a MS Windows install (feel free to identify one that works better). While continuous improvement should always be a goal, I think this is a wonderful product.

[DaveR]

Actually what I'm referring to is making a full install to an empty drive from a running live CD that has been beat into shape - display works, network works ...

The installer should, IMO, look at the specifics of the running system and dupe them into the system it installed.

[RetroTechGuy]

Actually what I'm referring to is making a full install to an empty drive from a running live CD that has been beat into shape - display works, network works ...

The installer should, IMO, look at the specifics of the running system and dupe them into the system it installed.

Fair enough. I noticed the same thing when I installed from a patched CD (I made the simple change that the CD always fsck the pupsave before loading it) -- this change did not propagate into the install, and so I manually patch it on every install.

From that particular standpoint, I wonder if you could boot your live CD, mount your empty HDD, and:

Code: Select all

cd /
cp -adir * .* /mnt/sda1/

Well OK, you may need to exclude /mnt/ from that cp process... (BTW, IIRC I had done this a few times on my old Debian v1.3 system, as I upgraded and replaced HDD -- I believe that I may have even done it from a mounted filesystem, as crazy as that seems)

If your current HDD install is truly brain dead, you could try it without harm.

Keep in mind that you'll need to take some actions to make your HDD bootable (grub, manually link the appropriate files/folder/etc.)...since the things that make a CD bootable are different than a HDD...