the MEPIS-type installer: was it Mr. Woodford's creation?

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lonesomepoint
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Joined: Thu Oct 25, 2012 2:34 pm

the MEPIS-type installer: was it Mr. Woodford's creation?

#1 Post by lonesomepoint »

Another of the several reasons I'm not motivated to change distros is that I like the Mepis-type installer. It's very fast and very convenient. I must assume everyone else is happy with it as well, because besides that it has never been extensively modified (only slightly), it pre-dates MX or antiX. If you ran Mepis back when we had Mepis, you will recall that it used the same installer--again, with only one or two minor differences. Honestly, our installer resembles MX itself: minimalist and efficient without sacrificing ease of use.

There is one thing I don't know and sometimes wonder. Did Warren Woodford create the Mepis-type installer, or did it come from other distros using an identical or similar design? I'm not sure because I've never seen our installer design in other distros; but then I hardly would, because I've used Mepis or descendants for the last twelve years.

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dolphin_oracle
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Re: the MEPIS-type installer: was it Mr. Woodford's creation?

#2 Post by dolphin_oracle »

The original code for the installer was written by WW. anticapitalista made major modifications for antiX, and both mx and antiX have made significant changes even since then. We recently completed a unification project to consolidate differences from the antiX and MX versions of the installer back into a unified code base. The new installer, which looks more or less just like the old one, recently debuted on antiX and will debut soon on MX.
http://www.youtube.com/runwiththedolphin
lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 - MX-23
FYI: mx "test" repo is not the same thing as debian testing repo.

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Adrian
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Re: the MEPIS-type installer: was it Mr. Woodford's creation?

#3 Post by Adrian »

Warren created the installer, the logic and most of the code comes from it, but we did modify it heavily at some points. The need to modify the installer made me learn Qt, initially the goal was limited, like remove the "I agree" on the license screen, then we started to add options and capabilities (like being able to install /home on another disk -- the initial installer didn't allow for that, labeling partitions, preserving Live changes, encrypting /home and so on). The installer is my least favorite programming project because it's hard to test and if you break something it affects pretty much everybody and not everybody updates before installing to get the fixes, the other programs are more likely to be used from installed systems and get updates while people are less likely to update their Live USBs (and Live DVDs upgrades don't survive a reboot so people don't bother).

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