Alpine Linux:Ideas: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 05:15, 26 August 2010

This is the place to put feature requests and share ideas for Alpine. From these we'll create tickets in the issue tracking system. Discussions of ideas should probably take place on the Alpine-Devel mailing list, but feel free to use the discussion function of the wiki too.

Booting from net

Priority: low

Provide ip address and remote hostname as kernel parameter and run directly from network. The only thing needed for this would probably be a special initramfs image.

Not sure how useful it would be, but it would be cool.

Installer templates

Have some "templates", or presseeds or something similar so you can easily install a lot of alpine boxes.

Autorun program/script on CD

Could be nice with an autorun program that will be executed when cd is inserted in a windows computer. It could have a menu with the following options:

create boot floppy for CDROM
create boot floppy for USB
install Alpine on an USB drive

Package database

A database with all the packages and their status.

Possibility to rate/vote packages? Some easy way for users to give feedback on what packages they think we should focus on.

Installer for headless installs

Installer that would create a bootable iso/usbdrive + a working config. Could be written in wxWidgets so it could be run from either Windows or Linux.

@@ Line 2: / Line 2: @@
 === Booting from net ===
+'''Priority:''' low
 Provide ip address and remote hostname as kernel parameter and run directly from network. The only thing needed for this would probably be a special initramfs image.
-=== Webconfig framework ===
+Not sure how useful it would be, but it would be cool.
-I have no idea how this should be done. But i think we should support and encourage ssl from the very beginning.
-on 16 Aug 2006, Natanael posted to the mailing list:
- Some ideas for the webconf.
-. Log changes.
- Log changes and add a posibility to add user comments. Something like
- blogging. You can add comments.
- Log could look like:
- <id> <when> <who> <what> <where> <comment>
- For example:
- admin changed ip of eth0 from 192.168.0.100 to 192.168.0.1 "Just testing"
- admin added firewall rule <bla bla> "Disallow web traffic thats not proxied"
- admin changd password for root
- ncopa removed static ip from DHCP server "This device is no longer used"
-. User comments on the web pages.
- ncopa <date>
- The static routes are there as a workaroud for ....
- admin <date>
- Note that this is the second DHCP server so don't change the ip range withough checking rtr-02
-Regarding item 1, busybox diff is built into alpine.  The model could run a diff from the previous config file and the current config file; also noting ip addr / timestamp / username for the person making the change.  This has the very interesting possiblity of rollbacks - playing a diff "backwards" (patch -R) could allow for undo/redo within the web framework.
-Item 2 is just another text file for the controller to manage.
-=== Running from read only media ===
-One of the concepts are that the media from where the sytem loads should be readonly. We could have a check in the boot process if media is readonly. If it is not, refuse to start. This is specially good for USB sticks, where a USB stick that is possible to physically write protect would be required.
 === Installer templates ===
@@ Line 56: / Line 22: @@
 Possibility to rate/vote packages? Some easy way for users to give feedback on what packages they think we should focus on.
-=== Version number on floppy ===
-As Alpine progresses, the data stored on the floppy needs to be converted from version to the other. It would be nice to be able to see what version of Alpine the data on the floppy belongs to. Then the  conversion script will have to do less magic to upgrade the data.
 === Installer for headless installs ===
 Installer that would create a bootable iso/usbdrive + a working config. Could be written in wxWidgets so it could be run from either Windows or Linux.