[Shift2] Dead?

[Asharae]

Can do but it'd depend on if they want grub installed or not, plus the type of grub (EFI vs BIOS) plus if it'd need to add windows or other OS's and whatnot :/

Could you not have those options underneath an "Advanced" tab?

[Brandon H Supervisor]

Can do but it'd depend on if they want grub installed or not, plus the type of grub (EFI vs BIOS) plus if it'd need to add windows or other OS's and whatnot :/

could you not set it up to auto detect whether the computer uses EFI or BIOS?

[n_K]

could you not set it up to auto detect whether the computer uses EFI or BIOS?

I don't have a clue how to do that, not sure if there is an easy way to do that.

Adding another tab would really be ass-ache :p The other 2 tabs both currently look like this;

[Haggis Veteran]

Maybe somewhere in the installer we could ask the question on installing default apps

such as

Browser

Mail

IM

and link this in with the installer so it only install the ones you choose?

is this becoming too advanced?

[n_K]

They'll be in the 'install X' parts, e.g. 'Install Web Browser' -> 'Configure Web Browser' -> Select Chrome/Opera/Firefox/other.

[simplezz]

As far as partitioning goes, you could just call parted as a system command.

system ( 'parted mkpart /dev/sda1 0 -1', $retval );
system ( 'mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1', $retval );

Or something like that.

[n_K]

Eh? That's the idea but not what I mean.

How to display/edit the partitions on the GUI is what I mean, e.g a listview or a graphical pi chart or other chart or what?

[Asharae]

Eh? That's the idea but not what I mean.

How to display/edit the partitions on the GUI is what I mean, e.g a listview or a graphical pi chart or other chart or what?

Couldnt you do it like where it is a bar going across divided into sections for each partition with a more detailed list underneath?

[n_K]

Make an image example :p

[Haggis Veteran]

kinda example

[n_K]

Humm to do that I'll have to figure out how to do partition resizing via CLI with parted :/.

Graph shouldn't be hard though, output an image with PHP-GD and just import it into the GTK interface!

[Haggis Veteran]

maybe ask another arch distro how they do it?

[n_K]

On arch you do it all yourself via CLI using fdisk/gparted.

If you had a blank drive or spare space it's easy, but when it comes to resizing, it's kinda annoying and slighty more dangerous, plus if they've already got (MBR) 4 partitions or 3 and want to make 2 more, with 4 it's not possible to do and with 3 it'd need to be made as an extended partition, or they can have upto 64 with GPT! So it's gonna be a pain to do.

Plus I'm now at uni :p so time is limited.

[n_K]

Pretty basic thing I just knocked up using arial with PHP-GD and some false partition data.

(Or heck, we could get even more geeky and do it using gplot http://gplot.sourceforge.net/ or gnuplot http://www.gnuplot.info/ :?)

[Yorak]

On arch you do it all yourself via CLI using fdisk/gparted.

If you had a blank drive or spare space it's easy, but when it comes to resizing, it's kinda annoying and slighty more dangerous, plus if they've already got (MBR) 4 partitions or 3 and want to make 2 more, with 4 it's not possible to do and with 3 it'd need to be made as an extended partition, or they can have upto 64 with GPT! So it's gonna be a pain to do.

Plus I'm now at uni :p so time is limited.

cfdisk would be much easier, in my opinion.

[Matthew_Thepc]

Hey, everybody, just a quick little thing but I feel we should get it out of the way before we go any further - what license should we use?

IMO, the MS-PL is a pretty straight-forward license, but since we're using Arch, aren't we required to use Arch's license?

[n_K]

Whatever we make (script wise) is under whatever license we want it to be under, whatever license the OS is under depends upon what software is included with it, some packages are GPL, some are BSD, some are others, etc.

Also, I've not looked it up but does cfdisk support GPT? fdisk doesn't so it rules that out.

[Haggis Veteran]

Not sure about cfdisk but parted does

[n_K]

OK so I just quickly added the PHP-GD code to the installer code (after compiling php-gd twice!) and made it change the first image to see if it'd work. It did! So then I got it working via a GDKPixBuf using a GD image instead of having to save the file at all, so it's pretty nifty!

[Haggis Veteran]

Cant wait for this to work

as soon as we get to a GUI its getting installed lol

[Asharae]

Wow!

This is looking absolutely fantastic! Cant wait to get hands on this :)

[n_K]

So I still can't find a way to work out if the system is booted via EFI or BIOS! I guess in theory we could make the EFI grub pass an extra kernel parameter maybe? Would need to compile it differently.

I found this but not sure how to tell if it's EFI or not ? http://smackerelofopinion.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/dumping-acpi-tables-using-acpidump-and.html

[Asharae]

Using an extra kernel parameter could work, looks blooming hard, well to me anyway, your the main man for code for a reason! :p

[simplezz]

So I still can't find a way to work out if the system is booted via EFI or BIOS! I guess in theory we could make the EFI grub pass an extra kernel parameter maybe? Would need to compile it differently.

I found this but not sure how to tell if it's EFI or not ? http://smackerelofop...pidump-and.html

You could always read the partition table of the block device. A EFI disk will consist of a legacy protective MBR, and the rest of the GUID table. The legacy MBR contains a single partition with a type of 0xEE. That can be used to determine if the block device is EFI or standard bios.

I wrote a little code to play around with reading partition tables of block devices, but I haven't worked out how to extract the correct disk geometry yet so the values are wrong, but it runs and parses the partition table. Specifically, it's a bit of a pain extracting sector and cylinder information from CHS. But I'll have a look at it again later.

disk.zip

[n_K]

But if the drive is blank ^ then it won't detect an EFI table because the disk won't have one :/.