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[Enhancement/Feature Request] Advanced Installations

Open Dimensional opened this issue 5 years ago • 1 comments

I've been looking over how the system works a bit, and one thing that came to mind was how to add extra partitions with custom sizes. I'm aware of the PINN System Resize website, but what if people want some extra setup for themselves?

When working on the Kali images, I had manually changed the partition size setting and set the expand variable to false, which made me wonder something. What if we could do an advanced installation feature, or a review of options, similar to how a linux installer requests the user review the changes they plan to make to the drive they plan to edit?

The thought was if the user selects the OSs to install, the installer would download the metadata files, the os.json specifically, and generate a rough estimate/preview of what each partition will be in size. From there a user could specify if an OS will be auto-expanded by the system, or if they want to customize and set a size the OS data partition will be, with a hard limit on the minimum size being what's in the os.json file. After that it would download the OS files and install them.

After that, another idea I had was allowing the creation of a custom 'project space' partition on the fly which could fill up the remainder of the SD. I do this normally after I've installed a few OSs, so I can created a shared space for them all to use for things like documents, multimedia, system configurations that I need to copy between OSs, etc. I personally use btrfs as that shared partition because of it's subvolume feature that allows me to effectively directly mount a folder within the partition without needing to mount the whole partition itself. In this example I have a shared documents folder, movies, and for RetroPie and Lakka, roms and bios. With that I won't have to have multiple copies of the same files or have to mount another OS partition just to access these files, and risk editing something that breaks said OS.

Considering PINN is already a software not meant for the uninitiated user, it would be understandable some of us would do more advanced stuff like this with it after the defaults are done and things are installed.

Dimensional avatar Nov 30 '20 21:11 Dimensional

Some interesting ideas. I have some similar ideas in my roadmap already, but I'll bear the others in mind.

procount avatar Dec 01 '20 00:12 procount