Re: [MiNT] Gentoo Installer? (PLEASE: NO DAYDREAMING IN THIS THREAD PLEASE!)

[Jo Even Skarstein <joska@online.no>]

Kåre Andersen wrote:

> There is no need to install all of easymint. You need mke2fs, tar and
> gzip. A mint kernel and a shell (i suggest conholio) is also useful...
> Thats about it.
> Boot to shell or aes, mke2fs on the partition you want to use. tar
> zxvf Alans tarball. Voila.
> 
> An installer would be awesome tho :)

Sounds like there's a need for two installers.

1. A general FreeMiNT installer that installs/updates the kernel, XaAES
and the basic tools (like TosWin2 and the fs tools). This is totally
independent of Gentoo, SpareMiNT or any other distribution, it just
installs and configures a working MiNT/AES setup.
2. The next step which is the Gentoo installer. I haven't tested Gentoo
yet, but from the descriptions all this installer has to do is to
initialize an ext2 partition and unpack the tarball. From then on the
maintenance of the Gentoo is system is taken care of with the Gentoo
package manager, right?

I have an installer as described in (1). I wrote it in 2000 for a MiNT
"distribution" I called NewbieMiNT. Unfortunately this installer was
never properly finished as I messed up my gcc install and lost
motivation. Also, it depended heavily on a closed source GEM library so
the code isn't suitable for release. Some screenshots of the installer
can be seen here:

http://web.archive.org/web/20000527055027/http://atari.nvg.org/

I think that such an installer would be a good addition to the FreeMiNT
project, and with this in mind I started to rewrite this installer a
couple of months ago. Unfortunately I've had a lot less spare time than
expected, so progress is very slow.

Jo Even