LGP Has A New Linux Game Installer

Hi Ryan. Welcome to the board.

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Originally Posted by icculus

MojoSetup does both of these things. The no-GUI mode option you mention looks something like this in the new UT3 server patch:

./UT3-linux-server-02202008.bin --ui=stdio -noreadmes --i-agree-to-all-licenses
--destination /where/i/installed/ut3-dedicated

It's a little chatty, but it gets the job done.

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That definitely would get it done, but wouldn't it be a little easier if all of the other extra parameters (-noreadmes --i-agree-to-all-licenses) would be assumed under --ui=stdio? Hmm... in retrospect, this is probably for flexibility.

Although it is true that at the end of the day, these things are really self-extracting sh scripts.

I wonder how LGP's new installer is different from Mojo.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by niniendowarrior

That definitely would get it done, but wouldn't it be a little easier if all of the other extra parameters (-noreadmes --i-agree-to-all-licenses) would be assumed under --ui=stdio? Hmm... in retrospect, this is probably for flexibility.

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By default, the stdio UI is interactive: it asks questions, it makes decisions based on input, etc. The above command line is really just answering all the questions up-front.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by niniendowarrior

I wonder how LGP's new installer is different from Mojo.

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As an updated loki_setup, it's a radically different beast. Specific features aside, the one thing loki_setup needs more than any specific patch is a complete rewrite...which was largely the impetus for building MojoSetup.

--ryan.

[fishing]So Ryan, what type of installer does the soon-to-be-released UT3 client use?[/fishing]

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Originally Posted by deanjo

[fishing]So Ryan, what type of installer does the soon-to-be-released UT3 client use?[/fishing]

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Aaand you think he's going to tell you... Good luck with that... ;)

Judging how Ryan completely ignored the UT3 thread... it's unlikely you will be able to get anything. :D

Thansk for clarifying that, man! I was speaking of the ETQW installer - the ut3 server is fine, as a server admin surely will know his way around the terminal (or will have to!).


I hope your dilemma gets solved. I'll help out the translation problem meanwhile :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by icculus

No, it's not. We shipped the UT3 server with just the stdio UI because most admins were hostile to the idea of having an installer at all (they just wanted a .tar.bz2, Epic's legal required that we show a EULA, though). Since most admins would be installing it over a ssh session, basic text to stdio was the best plan.

My understanding is that TTimo did something similar with ET:QW...I think at the time he shipped it with the ncurses UI.

MojoSetup also has a GTK+2 UI, and other variations on the way, and has the ability to choose the best UI for the environment at runtime.



Hence the dilemma of needing to set an executable bit on an executable. :)

Windows gets around this because they just look for the .exe extension, Mac OS X gets around this because they can ship real disk images with the executable bit set. Linux is...lacking for a decent solution at the moment. makeself gets around this by wrapping your installer in a self-extracting shell script and praying that the desktop does the right thing when you click it but that has a different set of problems.

Eventually this will need a better solution that involves improvements at the distro layer.



It looks like they reached rough parity with the icculus.org branch of loki_setup. I'd be curious to see the changes.

--ryan.

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Hi everyone.

Just as a note, LGP is keen on Mojo Setup and Ryan and I talked about it about 18 months ago and discussed various things we wanted to see in installers and uninstallers. We dont have anything against Mojo, quite the opposite. I said to Ryan at the time I thought he was rewriting the wheel, and he gave me some interesting ideas as to how Mojo would be a real improvement over Loki/LGP setup. And as and when its all done, he should be right.

I have plans to move LGP to using Mojo as soon as it is doing all we need it to do, and when it starts getting close then we'll probably switch development effort to it instead of LGP-setup.

This includes, but is not limited to, being able to seamlessly support existing products, some of which will be being updated via lgp_update and some then via mojo. Some users may have lgp_update and mojo and thus each updater must be able to handle both types of game or users will be irritated when they run lgp_update and cant update the latest game they have to run mojo_update or whatever instead... its untidy, its not what users want or expect. AFAIK Ryan is aware of the issue and has plans to make Mojo compatible with other installers through some kind of magic spell that only his unwell mind can cast {:-)

The code changes for LGP setup are similar to the Loki setup cos we didnt fork, we re-downloaded the source a few months ago and are building from there. The developer working on them has passed changes back to the mailinglist or some other place I forget where, to ensure that anything we do or fix goes back into the main branch and improves the loki installer for all. We'll also be putting the lgp-* source up for download via opensource.linuxgamepublishing.com at such a time as we start bundling it with public products (so far our changes to setup and update have been only released on closed beta tests).

We have more changes on the way, Ive tasked my guy with lots of new fun tasks that I'd like to see and he is working on them now. Stuff to come is:

Playing sound files on installers
Playing videos instead of the static splash image
Displaying more than one image instead of the one splash image.

All just eye/ear candy but, fun stuff nonetheless {:-)

Just as a final note to the guy that was saying we should use rpm/deb/apt/yum/whatever.

Just how many installers should we make? We would need to make one per distro VERSION, so fedora thats 8 installers right there. And you say that you know all about the problems of packaging and we should 'just make it good for the majority' - why on earth would we do that?? What we have works for EVERYONE, and requires one type of install. Distrowatch currently records 355 different Linux distros. Lets say half of them are tightly bound to another distro, so say around 175 distros. Lets then say we need to make a minimum of 3 packages per distro to work with the dependancy tree of that distro. So thats 525 packages, lets say it takes an hour to make each package. Thats going to mean a release will take 13 weeks to package up. Right now it takes 2 or 3 hours. Thats to get the same result. Those are finger in the air numbers, so dont bother to tell me how wrong I am cos no matter how wrong I am you cant tell me we can support every single different package manager for every version of every linux distro in 2-3 hours per release...

Great news :)

(and that {:-) smiley is so cool man)