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Does Funtoo Have A Graphical Installation Interface?


mlauzon

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No, but it's quite simple to install.

 

edit: I tried to install void linux the other day and it was a nightmare because of the installer, either not working or not being clear on what it required. I'm glad the funtoo install is as it is, it means that it works and you understand what you need to do. It's much easier in my opinion.

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Honestly, if you need a graphical installer I suspect Gentoo/Funtoo are not for you.  Much of the system administration requires CLI work, and while it's not difficult, a reluctance to learn would make it quite difficult.  I would urge you to give it a shot, it's not that difficult, though it does require patience and a decent amount of time.

 

For what it's worth, I only really started to understand Linux after installing Gentoo on my computer 10+ years ago in high school.  I had dabbled with Debian and Red Hat but never really got what I was doing until jumping in with Gentoo.  Many friends gave me shit about it in high school, but my self taught Linux skills have gotten me every job I've ever had, and is a super critical part of my current job (though unfortunately we do not use Funtoo!).

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The main issue is not the installation, IMHO, but the fact that it is not a distribution, but a meta-distribution. The choices on system tools have not been made for you. Which tools and how they are configured is up to you. This is incredibly powerful, but with any great power comes great responsibility.

 

Its up to you to make informed choices and if you aren't a Linux veteran, you simply can't do that. Yes, the defaults are sensible, but many of the things we take for granted are things new users would screw up.

 

I actually suggested a graphical installer that would automate and autodetect standard configurations and install binary packages so you can get up and running as quickly as possible with binaries for the larger apps so you aren't spending all your time and bandwidth. My plan on this was to use a web based installer so that you can install headless and this makes the system fairly easy to modify (unlike anaconda) with shell scripts as the backend and ShellInABox for raw shell commands. There wasn't any demand so its been shelved.

 

Taglines suck. https://eddon.systems

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Indeed the approach of Funtoo / Gentoo (but also T2, LFS, Arch and others). require a little 'knowledge of the bash shell, how to partition the HDD, and to not be afraid. I am available if you want to talk in PM.

I hope to help poterrti so.

 

Read in a little 'in PM (private messages).

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The general response I got was that Gentoo/Funtoo users don't want a graphical installer. From my standpoint, I just want the install process to be faster, less error prone, and easier to duplicate. And I think we could win over a lot of users that want to install in a simple and fast manner, but don't want systemd. From a server standpoint, I can understand why rolling releases offer too many variables and why portage 'stable snapshots' would be advantageous, but few people know how to set that up.

 

For example, it would be nice to if the installer wrote a config that could be shared on Google Drive or something and then the next install could just ask if you wanted to configure the system the same way.

 

Taglines suck. https://eddon.systems

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What about an installer script?  That could potentially be useful, though without a lot of effort it would severely limit options.  I wrote something like this for a customized Debian installation for an ARM board I made, it worked pretty well, but is very specifically tied to that specific ARM board.

 

I'm not sure how useful it'd be though, because once you've got your system up and running you're kind of SOL on actually using it if you haven't gotten some hands on experience with Portage during the install...

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What about an installer script? That could potentially be useful, though without a lot of effort it would severely limit options. I wrote something like this for a customized Debian installation for an ARM board I made, it worked pretty well, but is very specifically tied to that specific ARM board.

 

I'm not sure how useful it'd be though, because once you've got your system up and running you're kind of SOL on actually using it if you haven't gotten some hands on experience with Portage during the install...

Installer scripts become more useful when they work from a config file generated from a GUI. And the goal isn't necessarily to be totally noob-friendly, but rather a more efficient process. However, there are couple of GUI tools compatible with portage such as port-hole and there is a portage back end for Gnome Apps.

 

Taglines suck. https://eddon.systems

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I've been working out a json template / bash script to setup my system.

With the end game being to hook it into metro to create my own stage3, exactly the way I want it.

Including all the basics, netif, hostname, samba configs, et all.

 

Basically I'm copying the modified configs from my current system, setup exactly the way I like, removing the comments and whatnot, and reformatting the config to a json entry, then catting the entries into a master file, resulting into a system config.

Then I added the epro profiles.

I can generate the system.json, but haven't got any further.  Not sure how to apply it in a consistent manner. 

Borked a lot of VM's to get to this stage. Thank god for zfs snapshots. 

 

Just need to work out the metro interface.

Building out the stage3 in metro seems to be the way to go to me as it gives you a clean system, with all deps worked out.

 

Is there a way to get metro to read a json file? 

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