[KLUG Members] Can anyone say...Boogies?

[Robert G. Brown]

On Wed, 31 Dec 2003 07:27:32 -0500, Adam Williams <awilliam@whitemice.org> wrote:

>> >> Now, was this the right thing to do at the time? 
>> >It was the easiest way to get Boogies up and running at the time.
>> >Being the easiest to get going is not necessarily the best way ....
>> It sure wasn't modular!
>> But that was the way we did it... one HUGE tar file.....
>> However, this is a matter of execution, not principle. 

>We knew the machine configuration, network configuration, etc...  so it
>was easy to cheat.
Certainly true, and one reason we didn't need an installer. In a couple of
places where we had to make choices, they ended being one-choice-fits-all.

>An installer the like of SuSe's or ananconda is no
>trivial thing,  when one starts to enumerate the issues that they
>seemlessly (hopefully) deal with and configure for it gets REALLY
>long in a hurry. ...
That's all quite true, and the right direction to take (assuming all this
would be packaged as a distro) would be to configure one of these installers,
probably in the context of an existing distro, ***NOT*** write our own.

>>>>Frankly, I feel that a good case can be made for either method ...
>>>If "we" (KLUG) were to distribute this software, a complete distro is
>>>the WRONG way to do it,...
>>It's a big "IF" in any case, since I see no demand for this software.
>>Now, if someone wanted the timekeeping software,....
>One could do what the K12 LTSP people did and retrofit an existing
>distro (ala the old BS-Ware Pro).  That would seem the ideal way to go
>about this,  or just write a doc about setting up a kickstart server to
>do this on-site - since I suspect the cyber-cafe (if any still exist) is
>a frequest re-install/replace-hardware kind of deal.

Listening to the folks that make the demand for this stuff is critical.
If most of them are fairly knowledgable, and have systems on which they
want to install a cybercafe/kiosk layer, then we would probably go with a 
set of packages and docoumentation. If they were less knowledgable and
less able to read documentation, and had systems where the existing software 
was considered fungible, some form of distro, with a more complete installer,
would probably be a lot more effective.

							Regards,
							---> RGB <---