[Dev] Discussion to make a decision about "MIPS Installation/Precursor OS" article

Charles Roth cer at parlementum.net
Mon Jan 9 05:26:06 GMT 2012


This should become a bigger discussion perhaps. As my comrades know I'm not happy with the state of the Parabola installer itself, and while in 
the channel I toe the party line, if people ask me privately I give them this advice:

1) use arch net installer (which works, easily)
2) use migration script

We need to come up with easy to follow steps with a good installer or pragmatically provide a way to move from unfree to mostly free to free.

CER


On Sun, Jan 08, 2012 at 11:30:41PM -0500, Daniel Clark wrote:
> So I think the people who have parabola installed probably used the
> gNewSense installer or got a yeeloong pre-installed with gNewSense from my
> company. Unfortunately the gNewSense installer is currently broken and has
> been for quite a while. So I don't think there is currently a way to do the
> install without a libre distro without removing the hard drive, and IMHO
> that is too high a barrier for entry for new users. Also, I've found that
> 5-10% of the time doing this somehow corrupts the hard drive (this is with
> multiple machines and SATA adapters; I have no idea why this happens.)
> 
> IMHO it's important to be pragmatic while developing free software; just as
> rms built GNU at first using nonfree software as a base layer, I don't
> think it's a big threat to software freedom"to install a libre operating
> system via one that includes a few binary blobs that can then be deleted,
> esp. if that means the user and developer base to improve the libre distro
> is likely to increase faster due to decreased entry barrier.
> 
> The important thing is to delete the nonfree software as soon as possible.
> An example of this is when rms was using the OLPC XO1 as his main machine;
> he got the sys admins to delete the binary blob that made the built-in wifi
> work, and then was fine with the system (as that was the only nonfree bit).
> So perhaps we should include in the install instructions directions on how
> to remove all of the Debian stuff from the hard drive after Parabola is
> working (the only tricky bit is that some stuff on sda1 - eg boot.cfg -
> must be preserved.)
> 
> Perhaps even better would be instructions to replace the Debian system with
> a "backup" Parabola system, so if when changing low-level software on the
> main system it becomes unbootable, it would be easy to fix.
> 
> That said I have no dispute with parabola/mipsel needing an installer
> not dependent on any other software as soon as possible.
> 
> For the Yeeloong, the easiest install method (by pressing tab after having
> inserted a USB key with a vmlinuz file and a .lzma file) is also not well
> documented, but I'm guessing some combination of just looking at the BJLX
> example, doing more search for doc, and bugging BJLX and Lemote people will
> be enough to get it working.
> 
> On Sun, Jan 8, 2012 at 11:05 PM, Charles Roth <cer at parlementum.net> wrote:
> 
> > I vote for option 3 and/or let's develop an ISO for a free precursor OS
> > for people to use.
> >
> >
> >
> > On Mon, Jan 09, 2012 at 12:56:43AM -0200, André Silva wrote:
> > > This discussion is about that an user put an article that recommends
> > > Debian to install as precursor operating system. How to all knows,
> > > Debian is a non-free distro don't recommended by FSF (
> > > http://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html ), but as in this case is
> > > being used as precursor OS, we decided open a discussion, and you could
> > > to help us to make a decision:
> > >
> > > 1. Vote to eliminate this article completely, because it threatening the
> > > freedom.
> > >
> > > 2. Vote to keep it like this.
> > >
> > > 3. Vote to improve this article eliminating non-free contents and puts
> > > an alternative for it.
> > >
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
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> > >
> >
> > --
> > Charles Roth
> > Cultural Detective and Curious Antiquary
> > General Editor of The Encyclomundi Wiki
> > Email: cer at encyclomundi.org
> > Microblog: http://parlementum.net/parlementum
> > About Me: http://encyclomundi.org/wiki/User:Encyclom
> > "Like so many Victorian gentlemen of leisure, he published pamphlets"
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Dev mailing list
> > Dev at lists.parabolagnulinux.org
> > http://lists.parabolagnulinux.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
> >
> >

-- 
Charles Roth
Cultural Detective and Curious Antiquary
General Editor of The Encyclomundi Wiki
Email: cer at encyclomundi.org
Microblog: http://parlementum.net/parlementum
About Me: http://encyclomundi.org/wiki/User:Encyclom
"Like so many Victorian gentlemen of leisure, he published pamphlets"

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