Hi markus, On Thu, May 03, 2007 at 10:44:50PM +0200, markus reichelt wrote: > * Peter_22@xxxxxx wrote: > > > > Change of status, I'm currently working on it. > > > > > You work on what? Which distro is it? > > I'm a slackware user (as indirectly mentioned before) so I work on > the slackware installer. Hey, cool that you're working on this for slackware. :-) > Well, I've got it working (proof-of-concept), but the setup is > somewhat messy... Long story short, One has to know what one is > doing, most likely there won't be the infamous > Point'n'Click-interface due to the nature of a typical slackware > install. But I have some ideas of making life more comfortable in > this regard.... will put up a draft / roadmap when I'm confident > about beta testers. Just a thought: Reading your mail I went through the issues I came across doing similar for debian-installer -- and came to think that some of those issues probably affect all installers independent of the distribution to be installed. For example, the small amount of entropy gathered up to the point of key generation. I think it could be interesting to share some ideas and maybe code in this area. Like, to overcome the small amount of entropy, in Debian the user is presented with a text entry box and asked to type random characters into it - A progress bar shows how much mindless typing remains ;-) This is not exactly great, and I would be interested in discussing other approaches to the problem. E.g. we could try to take advantage of hardware RNGs - but how to detect them? hw_random used to autoload and provide a /dev/hwrandom (IIRC) on this system here but blocked reads forever as the chipset doesn't really have an RNG. Another idea was to just trigger any disk IO and hope that the IDE/SCSI driver contributes entropy this way. Or perhaps using audio/video-entropyd - but are they reliable enough on their own or should their output be fed through something like rngd to be safe? Or should we just use /dev/urandom? Regarding the implementation, large parts of our code are specific to the Debian partitioning tool (partman) and the debconf interface used in the installer, but maybe some bits are also applicable or interesting for your slackware implementation, maybe blockdev-wipe which is like dd if=/dev/zero with progress output. You can find most of this code at [1] and there is some discussion at [2] and also spread in the debian-boot list archives. Happy hacking and looking forward to your results :-) cheers, Max -- 1: svn://svn.debian.org/wsvn/d-i/trunk/packages/partman/partman-crypto 2: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/PartmanCrypto - Linux-crypto: cryptography in and on the Linux system Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-crypto/
