Current location:	Home
Current mood:	thoughtful
Current music:	mind.in.a.box (Crossroads album)
Entry tags:	furcadia, unfurcsetup

Command-line Furcadia Installer - Thoughts and Reasons
Today I've been thinking about a way to optimize my Furcadia updates. Being in the army on a very limited GPRS connection (100 MegaBytes/month) has its own little impact on downloading Furcadia installers and applying updates, and if such updates are mandatory and I'm out of spare bandwidth - I'd be rather stuck. Now since I don't really want to be stuck, I've got to come up with something better - I need to do what I was born to do and find a solution to this particular problem.

As of right now, Furcadia updates are anything but optimized - meaning you've got to download the entire package again and install it over the older one in order to update. A more space-conserving method would be to download only the files that are different, but implementing something like this for some 6-7MB would be bothersome and it would also attract additional problems that a common computer-illiterate user would encounter (and, therefore, cause), so no "intelligent" updates for us in the near future!

As a Linux user, I enjoy cheap, fast and powerful remote control capability (as obviously the SSH terminal takes a lot less bandwidth than Remote Desktop on Windows and can take even less if compressed) and have access to a bunch of fast servers as well as the one at home, so I could theoretically make one of the fast machines download the installer, install Furcadia, then transfer me only the files that actually changed - something that I'm sure would take significantly less bandwidth than transfer me the entire thing. The only problem is that I have to use wine (which server machines obviously don't have) and the graphical interface to click "Next >" all the time. I can't just do the setup from the command line - there is no such option!

So what do I do? While I can launch wine from home, I can't waste my bandwidth and time to wait for every graphical item to refresh itself - it would take as much as downloading furcsetup and doing it myself! Asking DEP to produce a command-line installer is out of the question - while sanctimonious will be in a very amused mood for the entire week, he won't do this. Asking Ash-Fox to install Furc every time and copy the files to one of his servers would be absurd, so the only thing left for me to do is to try and extract the data from within the installer, then process it so I have all the files in their original form where they should be. Since the latest installer seems to have bzip2 file headers within itself at around the offset 0x30044, chances are that this particular task is something that I will be able to do and even automate.

Let's hope that the present Furcadia installer remains for quite a while - this would be the next place that I haven't yet explored in the Furcadia realm. ;)

I will probably write down the progress on this here, so if interested, you can watch...