Re: Sysinstall is still inadequate after all of these years

On Thu, 3 Jul 2008, Lothar Braun wrote:

> Robert Watson wrote:
>
>> My primary concern about some of these replacement installer projects is 
>> that they've placed a strong focus on making them graphical -- I actually 
>> couldn't care less about GUIs (and I think they actually hurt my 
>> configurations, since I use serial consoles a lot), but what I do want is a 
>> very tight and efficient install process, which I feel sysinstall does 
>> badly on (not just for the reasons you specify).
>
> Hmm, how should a tight and efficient installation process look like in your 
> opinion? And what are the other points that are bad in systinstall?

For me, it's really about minimizing the time to get to a generic install from 
a CD or DVD.  Most of the time, I don't do a lot of customization during the 
install -- I configure machines using DHCP, I add most packages later, and I 
tend to use default disk layouts since my servers don't multi-boot and the 
defaults currently seem "reasonable".

I don't like being asked many more questions than whether or not to enable 
sshd, and what to set the root password to.  This means that I find our 
current distributions menu a bit inefficient (I don't want sub-menus, I just 
want checkboxes), and that the inconsistency in the handling of the 
space/enter/tab/cursor keys across different libdialog interfaces in the 
install is awkward.  The current generic and express installs seem to capture 
a lot of my desire, in that I can get a box installed in <5m including actual 
time to write out the file systems, which is great.  I really don't want to 
lose this with a new installer :-).

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge