Quirky Installer, initrd changes

Quirky Installer
I have made major changes. Simpler to use, I think.
The first window, for choosing 64bit/32bit CPU, amount of RAM, and BIOS/UEFI, has been removed.

A new feature is frugal install to drive. The Installer offered frugal install to partition, however, I noticed interest in the forum Quirky feedback thread, for frugal to a drive, such as USB Flash stick.

I have deprecated the .usfs.xz file, will now only ship a .iso file. The Installer only uses an iso file now.

initrd
Full installs do not use a initrd, only frugal.
I have added extra functionality to the 'init' script in the initrd, to support possible future requirements. It has grown to 199 lines.

I thought about offering more "Puppy like" features, but simpler. Instead of the 1000+ lines of the init script in Puppy, Quirky's init is only 199 lines.

I have changed the way init works. It now defaults to scanning the drives, looking for installed files. This can be bypassed later, either by "install_specs" on the kernel commandline, or remaster the CD.

There is a new file, 'Q_ID', that can be placed in a frugal installation folder, for the live-CD to find the correct folder.

The init script supports "half-full" installation, part frugal, part full. That is, there is a q.sfs, but the saved session occupies the entire partition. Haven't implemented that in the Installer yet.
This is a Puppy thing.

The init script will load any extra SFS files it finds in the install folder. Another Puppy thing, but lacking all the management functionality in Puppy, such as automatically fixing the menu when a SFS added or removed.
I put this capability into the init script, in case anyone really wants to load an SFS file.

popup
One extra thing. The 'popup' utility is misbehaving in Quirky Werewolf. The timeout feature wasn't working. This is in the 'pup-tools' package. Fixed.

Tags: quirky, linux