Gentoo++

[Charles Curley]

On Fri, 22 May 2009 16:02:45 -0600
Stuart Jansen <sjansen at buscaluz.org> wrote:

> On Fri, 2009-05-22 at 15:36 -0600, Charles Curley wrote:
> > One nice thing about gentoo installation: you can SSH into the
> > install CD, and do the installation from the comfort of your own
> > laptop. Including copying and pasting commands from the installation
> > instructions. Other disties, please note!
> 
> Would it be rude to yawn?

Yes, but don't let that stop you on this list. :-)

> 
> Anaconda (Red Hat's installer) has supported both telnet and VNC for a
> long time.

I never got the VNC stuff to work well on Fedora, but that could be my
problem. Now, if I could get the ncurses version of Anaconda to show up
on my laptop, that would be nice. The ncurses version is more flexible
if a bit more awkward than the GUI version.

> 
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Options
> 
> YaST/linuxrc (SUSE's installer) has supported both SSH and VNC for a
> long time.
> 
> http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/doc/suse/suse9.3/suselinux-adminguide_en/sec.suse.linuxrc.html
> 
> I don't consider lack of encryption a big deal. Installs should always
> be performed in an isolated environment anyway... Unless you're stuck
> using and Internet dependent installer like Gentoo's. ;-)

My attitude is: if you have wireless on your network, assume it's
cracked. Which means I'm not wild about shipping my root password over
telnet

Also, ssh does a better job of bringing the server to you than telnet
does. That is, the local integration is better. Case in point, X
tunneling. No need to fiddle with xhost (not that that's relevant to
gentoo's installation process).

SSH access means using emacs' tramp mode on the target. So I can use my
full up laptop installation of emacs to edit files on the target even
while running the minimal installation CD. It's like editing a local
file except it's actually in the target. Tramp mode can use telnet,
but I haven't tried it. 

-- 

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