"Partial installation" of MX?

[mxer]

Sounds like that could be quite useful for adding local necessities like internet configs automatically, etc. - & I like the sound of the OEM type setup, which would be useful when setting up an old computer for redistribution.

[figueroa]

Re: OEM installation.

This could be tricky with a fresh new user who didn't know what hit them. Be sure to give them an accompanying installation USB or DVD with a little instruction guide to use after they screw up on first boot.

[AK-47]

I haven't looked into this too much myself yet so I could be wrong, but it appears that this sort of thing in the installer will be the easy bit. The bit I'm not too sure about is how we can get it to work with the first boot of the installed OS. I'm currently resting a bit and not working on major features until the end of next week though, so I'll look into this more a bit later.

Even if this was requested in time for the April/May installer changes, I would have postponed it. There was a hell of a lot of work done and barely enough time for testing, so having more features to test at a time would have made things more difficult.

[JayM]

Also I have something else in plans, right now the installer save the chosen configs in a /var/log/minstall.conf (take a look at any MX-18.3 install) I would like to add a batch or "auto" install something like
mistall --auto /blah/blah/minstall.conf that would simple run the installer automatically with the settings from that minstall.conf file. Not sure how useful and what particular use case would serve (maybe doing multiple installations in a computer lab) but it's easy to add and it's fun to have some level of automation.

Multiple unattended, identical installations in a computer lab, classroom, office... The IT tech burns a dozen DVDs the day before rollout then just goes around from machine to machine outside of normal business hours, just booting them from one of those disks and letting it run while she's off booting up a few more, then goes back around removing the disks and shutting the computers down. That would greatly speed up a mass deployment.

OEM installation would serve the use case of setting up one or more individual computers for customers such as when selling them. The two could even be combined into automated bulk OEM installs.

[JayM]

Re: OEM installation.

This could be tricky with a fresh new user who didn't know what hit them. Be sure to give them an accompanying installation USB or DVD with a little instruction guide to use after they screw up on first boot.

I was envisioning something like, the first screen of the installer has some licensing legalese and allows the user to select his keyboard as it currently does. Screen 2 prompts to select the type of installation using radio buttons and text something like:

Normal installation Installs MX Linux to your hard disk, installs the GRUB bootloader, and prompts you to configure your computer and create a user account. This is what most people should select.
OEM installation Installs MX linux to your hard disk, installs GRUB, skips the prompts to set up the computer and create an account. The user will be prompted to do this later after booting into MX. Intended for setting up computers for others.

Normal installation would be selected by default, and when the user clicks next the installation proceeds as it does now.