dracut, or should booting a LiveCD touch the hard disk?

[Jaroslav Reznik]

Hi Ray,
I have to disagree. And why? Becuase of my experience. Few days ago one 
colleague came to my cubicle and asked me - KDE wants something and I don't 
know what they want. So I took a look and saw Plymouth with something that 
looks like password dialog. He was really surprised that it's asking for 
password. At first - really, I think it's dracut bug as I think it was password 
for encrypted device he uses on demand (I can ask him). But you can imagine - 
he's very experienced user and still he failed.
I'm not sure how difficult would be implementing font support (kernel's fonts?) 
and a few lines of translation wouldn't be such a problem.

Jaroslav

On Monday 05 October 2009 00:44:47 Ray Strode wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > What do others think?  Should the LiveCD by default access and
> > activate storage volumes, including encrypted partitions, on the hard
> > disks?  Should the LUKS prompts better identify the volume so that
> > users know what passphrase to enter?
> 
> This seems like a misfeature in dracut for LiveCD or otherwise.
> 
> The initrd should be about getting / mounted read-only and nothing else.
> 
> There's a reason why plymouth doesn't identify the volume in the initrd.
> Plymouth is graphical and so would need to ship fonts, font
> renderering libraries,
> and translations in the initrd to display text. That's a non-starter.
> 
> It's okay though, because in most cases the user should only ever get
> asked for one passphrase from the initrd,
> so we don't need to show anything but a lock icon and an entry box.
> 
> If that's no longer the case in a dracut world, we probably need to fix
>  dracut.
> 
> The alternative would be to drop to the console when unlocking and
> show untranslated messages.
> 
> --Ray
> 

-- 
Jaroslav Řezník <jreznik at redhat.com>
Associate Software Engineer - Base Operating Systems Brno

Office: +420 532 294 275
Mobile: +420 731 455 332
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