[clue-tech] Installfest in 3 weeks.

[T. Joseph Carter]

On Sun, Aug 06, 2006 at 09:31:31AM -0600, Collins Richey wrote:
> >SuSE and Mandriva seem to have
> >largely taken a back seat for the time being.
> 
> Don't know about SuSE, but the Mandrivel derivatives are defintely out
> (my $.02). While rebuilding my system the past few days (WinXP got
> trashed, and I need that from time to time), I decided to give a
> Mandriva and a PCLinuxOS (earlier Mandrake derivative) a spin. In this
> day and age of really slick LiveCDs and gui installers, both of these
> failed the sanity test. Both of them brought up my system in a mode
> that rendered the installer useless (giant 800x600 or less with most
> of the choice boxes off the screen and not even scrollable. Text mode
> maybe, but both of these are complete trash from my viewpoint. For
> $DEITY's sake, even my two year old Knoppix can do better that this!

Now see, I am happy with a text installer.  I just really like the idea of
a DWIM base system installation.  Give the user $PARTITIONTOOL to set up
what gets formatted and mounted where, unpack a base set of tools that
ever distribution is going to have using tar, set up the bootloader, and
let me go from there..

Of course, I've made some decisions about what the base system needs to
include that may seem a bit strange to long-time UNIX hands, such as a
basic webserver on localhost, a mailserver that can cache outgoing mail
for disconnected operation, and at this point, avahi.  The problem still
exists that no standard UNIX mailserver can just figure out its network
accessible hostname from behind NAT, and that both postfix and apache are
anything but lightweight.  Today, I'd say use them anyway.  Five years ago
I was more inclined to suggest thttpd and nullmailer would be reasonable
defaults for desktop setups.

In the case of the webserver, you just need enough CGI support to handle
an improved version of something like Debian's dwww on localhost, with the
option of turning on a personal webserver to share ~/public_html.  There
isn't really a good MTA for the home/desktop/laptop user.  You pretty much
have to have a working name for your server, or at least know your real IP
address, and none of the existing MTAs know how to figure out what it is.
Worse, with home setups (cable modems and whatnot) or laptop setups, your
real IP can and will change seemingly at random.

These days avahi just makes sense because it is the simplest and sanest
mDNS responder available from the user's perspective.  Failing to announce
your presence and services through mDNS is at best security through
obscurity and at worst being a bad player on the LAN.  I think it might be
reasonable to limit to whom mDNS responds by default (ie, to the private
use IP blocks), but I'd be comfortable with that being a single checkbox
in a network services configuration pane.

Just some ramblings.  Take them with a Syberian salt mine; I'm not as
paranoid as I used to be.