Installation Instructions are very Unclear
Hi,
I've found this repository because I'm trying to get hold of a VirtualBox image of Redox so I can give it a try. However I'm finding the instructions given here don't give enough detail or match what happens in my terminal. I'm not used to compiling rust, or cargo, so there's really not enough explanation for people like me. The issues I see are:
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A nightly image of rust is required. It took a bit of time to figure out the cause of this, purge my existing installations, and install this. Nothing too difficult but it would have been helpful to have mentioned in the instructions. I tried snap at first, I know that was a bad idea, but as rust is changing so quickly I thought it would be easier than a ppa.
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I'm not prompted for anything as mentioned, using the given build command.
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It's not entirely clear that the build process creates the OS and the installer, and then the run process builds the image
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I modified the default config to ask for the prompt. In either case nothing seems to happen:
temp@Temp2 /media/temp/Speedy/user/temp/Disc Images/VM/Redox/installer $ cargo run --release -- config/default.toml
Finished release [optimized] target(s) in 0.06s
Running `target/release/redox_installer config/default.toml`
Install Config {
general: GeneralConfig {
prompt: false,
},
packages: {},
files: [],
users: {},
} to config/default.toml
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It's not really clear how the type of image to be created is made - I don't see this in the config, and I'm not prompted for anything
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I previously tried to modify the raw hard drive image to a format for VirtualBox but I ended up with a crash in boot. I didn't want to install Qemu if necessary, to avoid clutter for two virtual servers on my laptop, and the command-line arguments were very specific. I like really Challenger OSs in this day and age, and since Ubuntu-based distros are becoming larger and more bloated, I've had my love rekindled in Haiku, and in minimal software, that still provides full feratures and offers the Desktop metaphor, unlike the sort of minimalism in things like basing a desktop off i3 and Vim. However I really don't think that the way Redox is provided for download is helping the OS gain a user base. Linking straight to GitLab releases is cool and links to the source and all that, but for the time it would take to automate building a few preconfigured hard disk images for common VMs I think it would help a lot of people try out the OS as unfortunately the amount of time it's taken me so far really hasn't been worth it, and I still don't understand what I'm meant to be doing. Currently Haiku and Redox seem to be at opposite ends - From what I can tell, Redox is built using very recent technologies supports some more common applications, but is lacking stability in the kernel and core features to be usable on most baremetal, whilst Haiku, at least for x86 and common hardware, seems to have developed a pretty mature kernel by now but is lacking a decent set of userland applications to make it in any way usable as an everyday system. So I'd have really liked to have an image of Redox that I can just boot in a VM without thinking, and to take it for a spin and see how it compares, and to see how the different approaches of about the only two non-linux FOSS operating systems available differ from each other and whether anything learnt from one could help development with the other.
So, to summarise, I'd be very grateful if someone could update the readme to include some more information about the build process, and even more so if it could be cnosidered to include disk images for VortualBox, VMWare, and other VM platforms so that end users can give Redox a try with minimal overhead.
Thanks, keep up the good work.