Re: X and runlevels

[Frank Copeland]

On 4 Sep 00 09:43:35 GMT, Per Lundberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> "EB" == Ethan Benson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
>>> Sure. But whenever you install something that gets you a
>>> display manager, your system will boot up in X.
>EB> is that not what you wanted when you installed *dm ?
>
>Maybe, but having the option to get into console mode too would be
>nice. Sometimes, you might not want X to start up when you reboot. (I
>don't do this very often, but I know there are people that do)

Isn't ctrl-alt-F[1-6] good enough to get into console mode? In what
circumstances whould you not want X to start up on boot if you had
installed a *dm?

Frank


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Re: Need to clone machines efficiently - help?

[Frank Copeland]

Peter Eckersley wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 25, 2000 at 12:15:50AM -0800, Erik Winn wrote:

> >  Here is the first obstacle - not really a big one, but I spent all day 
> > digging around and couldn't really find any tools for this one: we want to 
> > be 
> > able to clone the machines easily over the local net. Mandrake has a tricky 
> > boot floppy that asks only for the eth0 config and then runs a bunch of 
> > perl 
> > to do the rest of the install non-interactively. I haven't started reading 
> > the scripts yet (that's plan B), instead I was hoping that someone had come 
> > up with something similar for debian. We are looking at hundreds of boxes 
> > already and its really just begun.
> 
> This was extremely difficult for us at first, simply because the
> hardware we got was so variable that no "standard install" was really
> possible.  There was one small shipment of machines with identical disks
> which we cloned using dd :).
> 
> Things have got much better lately, since we started receiving corporate
> donations of largeish groups of modern PCs with similar hardware.  The
> way we've ended up doing it is this:
> 
> * A debian mirror server
> * Customised task packages
> 
> So we start a normal debian install, but then pick
> task-computerbank-whatever and it's done.

I've made the current version of our task packages apt-get'able if you want
to have a look:

  deb http://thingy.apana.org.au/computerbank/debian cbv/
  deb-src http://thingy.apana.org.au/computerbank/debian cbv/

They are mainly proof-of-concept at the moment and need considerable
development, but they are already making life much easer for us.

> A custom task package might play really well with an automated
> installer, if your hardware is sufficiently uniform to support one.

As someone else pointed out there's the FAI project at

  

We still have to evaluate it properly but looks like it could be a very
useful package for us.

Frank

Re: How to get rid of non-free packers?

[Frank Copeland]

On Fri, 23 Aug 2002 14:06:50 + (UTC), Juhapekka Tolvanen <[EMAIL 
PROTECTED]> wrote:

> How about contacting authors of AmigaOS-versions of LHA?
> 
> http://lha.warped.com/index.html

I was going to point out that the (de)compression routines had been
written in M68K assembly, but according to
 that's no longer the case.

> Maybe they could release those sources under some free licence and then
> somebody could port them to Unix?

May be worth a try. The current maintainer has suggested the
possibility of releasing the source, and since development seems to
have stalled (no new release in 3 years) he may be more open to the
suggestion.

It remains to be seen how easy it is to port code written for a defunct
proprietary (but supposedly ANSI-compliant) compiler on a vaguely
unix-like but non-POSIX OS.

Frank
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