[ut2004] No love with linux installer

[Matthew Arnold]

Sean Hamilton wrote:

> I disagree.

[bunch of stuff snipped]

Then write this installer and hand it out to your newbie friends for 
testing. As ryan pointed out, the installer source is GPL. Fix it.

> More likely, Linux gaming will not receive commercial acceptance if even 
> a user with a few years' experience takes an hour just to get the thing 
> installed, complete with kernel recompile. I'll give you it was a bit of 
> an anomaly that I didn't have Joliet extensions support in my kernel, 
> but the installer gave me absolutely no clue that the problem was that 
> it couldn't find the file on the CD.

I'd like to know one single commercial Linux distribution that does not 
have Joliet support compiled into their standard kernel. I've personally 
used Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE, and now even Slackware and all of them 
did. It strikes me a bit strange to complain that the installer could 
not compensate for something you failed to compile into your kernel. 
Plus, as I pointed out before, all of this stuff is clearly documented 
in the Linux Gaming FAQ.

> My suggestion is that the linux-install.sh script on the first CD ask 
> its questions, then generates a makefile in ~/ut2004install. The user is 
> then told to switch to that directory and make install. The makefile can 
> have for each file a dependency on the destination file, as well as 
> md5-summing, prompting for new CDs, etc. Then, even if the power goes 
> out half way through, we can just make install again and resume where we 
> left off. Any errors are printed to the user instead of being silently 
> discarded. If there's a problem, make bails out, the user fixes it, and 
> make resumes where it left off. All these standard tools don't exist 
> just to take up space, they're actually useful. I know this isn't too 
> well thought out, but already it's better than what we have now. I'm 
> happy to write the code if there's interest.

Go ahead and do it, but what you describe doesn't sound newbie-friendly 
and it certainly doesn't sound any easier than the Loki installer. The 
DVD version of the game took a grand total of seven minutes to install 
for me (and that was with fumbling around trying to type in the CD key) 
and involved typing one single command.

Matt