Re: My project wish-list for the next 12 months

On Thu, 2004-Dec-02 07:55:30 +0100, Miguel Mendez wrote:
>On Thu, 02 Dec 2004 10:44:32 +0530
>"Kamal R. Prasad" <kamalp_at_acm.org> wrote:
>> I find X windows to be a bit too compute intensive. Maybe something
>> like apple's interface would be a good alternative [for those who
>> don't need X-windows' powerful graphic features].
>
>What makes you think so? X was originally desgined for systems with
>little memory and processing power, certainly a lot less than today's
>AMD and Intel space heaters.

Agreed.  But I don't think performance is the issue with X.  As I see
it, there are several major problems with building an X installer:
1) It quite common in the server arena for machines not to have any
   graphics head and X is incompatible with serial terminals.
2) You need to configure the X server to support your video adapter,
   mouse, keyboard and screen.  Remember, the "standard" basic VGA
   interface doesn't necessarily exist outside the PC world.  There
   are enough problems with keyboards (see one of Scott's other wishes)
   without wanting to add mice, screens and video adapters.
3) /stand is ~2.7M on i386.  A minimal X environment is going to be
   50-70MB.  This means 50-70MB less packages on CD1.
4) X is a RAM hog by sysinstall standards.  The minimum RAM requirements
   will go up significantly.  Whilst this shouldn't worry current
   generation hardware, it will make installing FreeBSD on older hardware
   (486 and P1) very difficult.

Yes, X is network aware but this doesn't really help for system
installation.  You might solve points 1 and 2 but you replace them
with the issue of how to bring up the network and arrange appropriate
client/server communication and authentication.

-- 
Peter Jeremy