DRAFT AND NOTES FOR PRESENTATION
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The Slackware installer

1 - Introduction

2 - Historic facts about the installer

2a- dialog not in the first release of Slackware, was developed specifically for Slackware's installer. Pat Volkerding is co-developer of this.

2b- the installer has stayed virtually the same all these years. This makes the Slackware installer easily recognizable by a lot of people who use different distros. Is this good or bad? There is no good or bad - while the outside stayed the same, a lot has happened on the inside.

2c- a 'DIY' installer. You need to run the 'cfdisk' 'pcmcia' and 'network' programs before starting the setup. This has two results: (1) you are in total contril over what happens during install, (2) the installation process can be scare new users of Slackware away.

2d- No HTTP/FTP support. Historically, fizban has had a floppy image for download on http://slackware.com/~fizbam with a ftp-installer which was using LUFS (predecessor of FUSE). Especially the lack of install from a web- or ftpserver is a complaint that has been heard a lot.

3 - New development

    - LVM support (after initial boot, any existing LVM volume will already be configured)
    - LUKS support (encrypted partitions, using cryptsetup inside the installer)
    - DHCP network configuration (pass 'nodhcp' as a boot command parameter to disable the automatic dhcp probe)
    - FTP & HTTP install option (fully dialog-based as opposed to the NFS setup which still drops you at the command prompt on one spot)
    - SSH client/server included (server can be started automatically and unattended so that you can run remote installations)

4 - Live installation example using QEMU
      HTTP server setup: 
        mount -t vfat -o shortname=win95 /dev/sdb1 /mnt/hd  (for UPPERCASE)
        cd /var/www/htdocs ; ln -s /mnt/hd/slackware-current
      NFS server setup:
        /mnt/hd/slackware-current      (ro,insecure,all_squash)
      ... but this complains about VFAT partition not being re-exportable
    - Options to explore are installation using LUKS, and/or LVM, with the network interface autoconfigured
      + LUKS: cryptsetup -s 256 -y /dev/hda
              cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/hda cryptslack
      + LVM:  pvcreate /dev/mapper/cryptslack
              vgcreate /dev/mapper/cryptslack cryptvg
              lvcreate -L 256M -n swap cryptvg
              lvcreate -L 1500M -n root cryptvg
              vgscan --mknodes
              vgchange -ay
        Remember that with LUKS partitions you will always need a small unencrypted partition to hold kernel and initrd (we use it for the '/boot' partition)
      + create a swap: mkswap /dev/cryptvg/swap
      + then... run setup
      + Do not select too many pkgseries: a ap n
    - Using the kbd= and nic= parameters to automatically start dropbear server
      + For this demo we use "kbd=nl nic=ne2k-pci:eth0:dhcp" as part of the "append" parameter. This will autoconfigure keyboard & network and start SSHD
5 - Dissection of the installer image
    - used to be disk image that got created using a loop-mounted file image
    - with 2.6 kernels, format switched to that of initramfs. Advantages of the initramfs:
      + easily created from a directory structure
      + loaded into kernel space, it is essentially a RAM based filesystem which could use all the memory available. It will not show up in the installer as a mounted filesystem
    - The 2.6 kernel and the use if initramfs enabled us to add a lot of interesting things to the installer. There was no way a 2. kernel would fit on a floppy, so we dropped floppy install completely.... the 1.4MB size limit has disappreaded. There was no way a 2.6 kernel would fit on a floppy, so we dropped floppy install completely.... the 1.4MB size limit has disappeared

6 - Suggestions for modification of the installer