Robert Watson wrote: > 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 :-). What about having two utilities for the installation process? Something like a very small (non-gui/non-X) version of "sysinstall" that just installs a base system and only has the functionality to - partition/label a disk - configure the network (if needed for installation) - install the base system (or parts of it) - install a boot manager and a second utility "sysconf" that provides the other stuff like post installation system configuration (sshd, mouse), installing packages, etc. The second utility could have an X-based GUI without disturbing the installation process of serial console users or people that don't like X on their machines. Would that be a good idea? Best regards, LotharReceived on Thu Jul 03 2008 - 14:56:46 UTC
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