Custom Query (1145 matches)

Reported by wdc, 15 years ago.

This has been variously discussed in email and zephyr, but never raised as an official enhancement request.

The greeter should, if possible, display what kind of system this is:

workstation cluster

etc. We are getting this stuff in athinfo. It is a challenge to display it, but probably worth doing.

I'm not sure what priority to give this. For now, I'll classify it as a "major" enancement because I believe it will have a good sized usability impact going forward.

Reported by geofft, 15 years ago.

On amd64-test I am running a version of debathena-alpine-config that hardcodes po15, and uses an undebathenified alpine, which is the config we intend to deploy once the other POs support krb5.

If I try to send mail (which wants a sent-mail folder) or manually create a Spamscreen folder, it fails because stock alpine can't parse mit.edu/hesiod/imap.

This config only appears in my own .pinerc:

amd64-test:~ geofft$ grep hesiod /etc/pine.conf
amd64-test:~ geofft$ grep hesiod .pinerc
folder-collections="MIT Mail" {mit.edu/hesiod/imap}INBOX.[],

So we're going to need to figure out how to override or overwrite the local user's folder-collections when we deploy the krb5 debathena-alpine-config.

Reported by jdreed, 15 years ago.

I finally got around to playing with the Live CD. It's a great start, but it needs some improvement before it's ready for general consumption:

• Networking: Logins fail miserably if the machine isn't registered. I realize this is a function of our environment, but since we're aiming this CD at new Debathena users, we should probably figure out a way to do something clever if the machine isn't registered for DHCP (a zenity dialog would be fine, prompting the user for a static IP would be awesome). What would be clever would be if the livecd did some sort of check before starting the greeter. In a dhreg situation, all DNS requests return an A record for 10.72.0.47, which is nic.mit.edu's other interface. So perhaps the livecd could try to fetch, say, http://debathena.mit.edu/livecd.txt, and parse the output. If it it matches what is expected, then they have network. If it's a 404 error, or some other page, it means they're actually talking to nic.mit.edu. And if it can't connect, then there's no networking at all.

• Partitioner in GUI installer: The partitioner does not understand LVM. As most Linux distributions have been defaulting to LVM for a while, this means a user cannot, for example, replace an RHEL installation without nuking their entire volgroup. I realize this is an upstream problem, but this is kind of a dealbreaker, since the tty mode partitioner (available via a PXE install) understands LVM just fine. The user should at least be informed of this before trying to install. Perhaps the "install" utility on the desktop can be wrapped with something which warns the user what will and won't work.

• Installation choices: Ideally, we'd give users the option of installing everything they can install from the installer script (except -cluster). However, in the short term, -standard and -workstation are fine. When we rename stuff, we should figure out if the latter will still mean -workstation or if we should change it to -graphical-login.