Proposal: A Simpler Linux Installer (Shallow Thoughts)

Akkana's Musings on Open Source Computing and Technology, Science, and Nature.

Wed, 14 Nov 2007

Proposal: A Simpler Linux Installer

I spent a couple of fruitless hours today trying to install PCLinuxOS, a well-reviewed new Linux distro, on my Vaio. I got lots of help from the nice folks on the IRC channel, and tried lots of different approaches, but no dice -- their Live CD won't boot because it doesn't grok PCMCIA CDROM drives, and they have no other installation method besides using the live CD.

Which brings me to today's question: Why do Linux distros have installers at all?

That probably sounds like a silly question. Of course you need an installer to get the system onto your disk ... don't you?

Well, yes and no. You could make it a lot simpler than anyone currently does.

What if you distributed a Linux distro as a filesystem image? Make it tar, zip, CD iso or whatever format you like -- but provide the user with a tree of files that, when copied onto a hard drive, can boot as a running Linux.

Set up this minimal installation filesystem so that when you boot into it, you get a commandline (X hasn't been configured yet) and a set of scripts that make it easy to go the rest of the way. From your running minimal system, you can configure X, set up networking, install more programs from the distro repositories (or even from a CD image), and do all the rest of the machine-specific configuration that an installer does.

The key is that this is all happening from a running system, not from some cobbled-together installer kernel or live CD.

If you have a problem with any step, you still have a basic running system, and tools to fix the problem. You avoid the usual loop:

If your X configuration fails, try running X configuration again -- no need to do another install from the beginning. If it doesn't see your network card -- ditto. Since this debugging all happens from a normal running Linux, you can use the normal Linux tools you're used to, not some busybox-based installer.

This model would be much more hardware agnostic than current installers:

Another advantage is that it makes it very easy to make a customized version of your distro: just take the basic system image, change the part that needs changing and tar it up again.

Some distros have gone a little way with this, with an installer that gives you a starter system, then scripts to download the rest -- but I've never seen one that made the minimal system available as a filesystem image, with easy instructions on going to the next step.

What about the people who aren't already running Linux or aren't comfortable writing a filesystem image to a partition?

No problem. They get a CD image with a very simple installer -- it handles the partitioning, copies the minimal install to the partition, and updates grub. It's as prone to hardware compatibility issues as any installer (though far less so than a live CD is) but it's still better than the current model, because it won't be trying to configure hardware until the user reboots into a working minimal system.

Of course, Live CDs are still cool -- on machines where they actually work -- for showing Linux to people not ready to commit to an install. But don't tie your installer to that. Give people a simpler way to install, one that's fast and straightforward and hardware agnostic and easy to understand or customize.

The tarball installer. An idea whose time has come. Now if I could just persuade the distros to offer it.

Update: a couple of people told me about Dynebolic, a distro that apparently does just that -- you install by copying a directory on the CD onto your partition, or rsyncing from their site. Nice!

Tags:
[ 23:59 Nov 14, 2007    More linux | permalink to this entry | ]

Comments via Disqus:

blog comments powered by Disqus