Quick LiveCD review

[Jeff Waugh]

Hi all,

Quick feedback on the new LiveCD, not really limited to the newness of the
LiveCD, just general talking points:

 * isolinux screens still display installer information

 * kernel boots without quiet - will we switch to quiet and add usplash bits
   to the livecd?

 * waiting for fb message is a bit weird - could we kick udev to make the fb
   devices appear earlier?

 * choose language dialogue string includes "for the installation process",
   which is not (completely) true for either the installer or livecd - it
   chooses the primary language for the final running systems, too. :-)

 * scanning cdrom stage took a long time on a couple of my machines (d-i)

 * network config still asks for my (dhcp-provided) hostname, but matt has
   said that he has more love to give to the network configuration stage, so
   this one will be fixed soon (better to document here than have everyone
   else asking...)

 * both detecting cdrom and detecting disks stage tried to load floppy.ko
   when i don't have a floppy drive. we might not be able to detect this,
   but can we avoid trying it twice? it takes a bit of time, at least on my
   machines.

 * preparing for live session stage was seeking quite a lot, and took a long
   time to complete (as with the post-configuration boot process). could we
   do some tricky file ordering when generating the image somehow? related
   to readahead stuff thom's been doing, but a bit backwards ;)

 * "this system is going down NOW!!!" is not a good message to display when
   starting the live image boot process ;-)

 * will we have usplash for the live image bootup?

 * doing vile hdparm things with the livecd makes it significantly faster.
   but i think we've pretty much determined that we can't do any of this by
   default, right?

These are really small problems in the grand scheme of things, just nits,
and the new LiveCD infrastructure is *awesome*. So much code reuse! So much
more useful for accurate pre-install testing! Hooray!

As a completely separate issue, the LiveCD tweaks update-notifier's Ubuntu
CD detection, so it offers to do an upgrade with it. Oops. ;-)

- Jeff

-- 
GUADEC 2005: Stuttgart, Germany                      http://2005.guadec.org/
 
    "Lord, thy one-liners are as good as thy tricks. Thou art indeed an
         all-round family entertainer." - Rowan Atkinson, Nazareth