Re: [MiNT] 1-18 release - userfriendliness

[Peter Slegg <p.slegg@scubadivers.co.uk>]

Some good ideas here. It was Jo Even that enabled me to upgrade
my basic Milan set-up with one of his scripts many years ago.

I suppose most users have a CD drive even if they don't have networking.

Peter

On Fri, 14 Dec 2012 14:54:17 , Jo Even Skarstein <joska@online.no> wrote:
> Now that 1-18 is about to be released I think it's time do discuss how to make the releases more user-friendly and easier to install/upgrade. This is still an issue for the less experienced users, 20 years after MultiTOS.
>
> There are several issues that needs to be addressed:
>
> 1. The docs are a mess. 20 years of notes tossed in a couple of directories.
> 2. The release archive is quite messy too, with all possible variants of the binaries in the same directories.
> 3. Setting up a network with MiNT is actually very simple, but there are no docs explaining how.
> 4. How do you transfer MiNT to an Atari with no networking? The archive doesn't fit on a floppy.
>
> A few weeks ago I made a simple FreeMiNT-setup for the Falcon/TT after a discussion on Atari-forum (see thread here: http://atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=24218). This discussion pretty much sums up the typical problems you face when you start to familiarize yourself with MiNT. I posted some brief instructions on how to install MiNT from scratch, and realized that most of the things the new user has to do could easily be skipped with a slightly better distribution.
>
> You can see the result here: http://atari.nvg.org/VanillaMiNT/. About 15 people has installed this on their Falcon/TT with very few problems. It does contain some stuff that's not part of FreeMiNT itself (Teradesk and DHCP client) but I think the principle works fine. I suggest that the build-process should end up with something similar - a zip archive that is easily transferred with floppies and installed simply by extracting them.
>
> If there's any interest my crude network configuration utility could be included as well.
>
> Jo Even
>
>
>