rullzer

So i got a PC to play with. Which allows me to really do something with the seeds. And of course to do other things with it. At first i figured it would be a nice add-on to my distcc-farm but then i realized it is a 32 bit machine and all my linux boxes are 64 bit. So it will be my little play box. I go play now.

So like i said the seeds are almost working as they should. OK i am lying they are not close to a final release of any kind. But that is also because i need to test the format tool on a real hard disk. For now i have only done it one a usb stick. And it worked fine. I just need to check if i didn’t miss something. So anyone that has a spare PC with absolutely no valuable data on it and has some free time to test it. Please leave a comment.

So i have to learn for my midterms. And well I am. However every hour i take a break of about 15 minutes. An well some of those 15 minutes i use to work a little on the program. Today i managed to get the program to create a file ‘mkfs’ which is a bash script. That bash script is used to create the filesystems. So everything is going into the right direction.

This part also makes it easier to create the fstab part of the devices.
In other words. So far so good Enjoy your evening

Why didn’t I think of this before. Linux is smart. And well in /proc/partitions we can find everything we wanna know about devices. Or well devices on which we might want to install a seed. So now i have to find a way to parse that. But that should not be a problem. Altough parsing text is not my favorite hobby.

Anyway the weekend just began so it is time for a nice cold beer

I just finished splitting out a lot of function from seed_installer.c to other files. This so we can read the files better. (without having to scroll trough way to much lines). Also I’m atm creating a lot of comment on what has to be done. So the project is now getting a structure.

To take a look at the code: grab the tarball

OK so after dropping the code on the repository and running indent on the code (now everyone can read it). However after reading all of the code again i came across a question. How do i find all the available block devices. Does anyone has a clue how to do this in C?

Ok i have to admit i was rather busy the last weeks so i did not do much with the code. However i added it to the svn (see here ). That way you can all watch me do my thing. Or just watch the files :P.

As you might know vhosting in apache is a pain in my ass! especially when it comes to more than 3. Since everytime i add a new one i have to restart apache. First of all. what is that :S i mean seriously. That is not the way to go. Now i can live with it that i have to do this for each domain.tld but i want to create subdomains. Now that is an interesting thing. Since my dns has a database backend i can just add subdomains into it. (nice! ) But i need to restart appache to make it all work.

Ah what am i talking about? You can all read this on in previous posts. However there i just could not figure out how to set the default vhost settings. Such as
AllowOverride All
order allow,deny
allow from all
since well that is the basics for me. But i think i got it now. However it needs some testing but i just wanted to share this with you You might be hearing a lot from me soon. When I’m rich and famous!

p.s. what has this to do with the seeds? Well it could be a really nice feature!

Since i am aiming on creating an installer partitioner, not a clone of parted, i am wondering how big it should get. For example only ext2 support (ext3 is just an extension and is done afterwards, just as ext4 i guess) and swap? Or also fat?? Well fat was a joke. I’m not going to support fat. Why would we want that on a linux system?

But ReiserFS is a different story. I never used ReiserFS so that is not helping. So i think for now i will just support ext2 and swap. With of course the ext3 extension. That should be sufficient to create a stable system. And is (at least where i come from) most used combination. Maybe in the future more exotic file systems will be added. But like i said the aim lies more on creating a good partitioner as part of an installer than creating a extended parted.

Now some people asked me if i would include ext4 support. The answer to that is no. ext4 is still experimental and with the seeds project we want to create a stable system ready to use. So when ext4 is stable and has advantages over ext3 for the seed project ext4 will be supported.

I’m working on creating a wiki page with detailed discription of my plans for the Gentoo Seeds Installer and my progress. It is not finished but i expect it to be finished somewhere next week. You can ofcourse already take a quick peek. And let me know if you already have comment.