Re: BSDInstall: merging to HEAD

On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 19:26, Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn_at_freebsd.org> wrote:
> As those of you who have been reading freebsd-sysinstall and freebsd-arch
> know, I have been working for a few weeks on a lightweight new installer
> named 'bsdinstall'. This is designed to replace sysinstall for the 9.0
> release.
>
> After two weeks of testing and bug fixes on the sysinstall list, I believe
> this now has all required functionality and is ready to be merged into the
> main source tree. I would like to do this on Tuesday, 18 January. Switching
> this to be the default installer would happen a few weeks after that,
> pending discussion on release formats with the release engineering team.
> This should provide a sufficient testing period before 9.0 and allow a
> maximal number of bugs to be discovered and solved before the release is
> shipped.
>
> Demo ISO for i386:
> http://people.freebsd.org/~nwhitehorn/bsdinstall-i386-20110114.iso.bz2
> SVN repository: svn://svn.freebsd.org/base/user/nwhitehorn/bsdinstall
> Wiki page: http://wiki.freebsd.org/BSDInstall
>
> Goals
> -----
> The primary goal of BSDInstall is to provide an easily extensible installer
> without the limitations of sysinstall, in order to allow more modern
> installations of FreeBSD. This means that it should have additional features
> to support modern setups, but simultaneously frees us to remove complicating
> features of sysinstall like making sure everything fits in floppy disk-sized
> chunks.
>
> New Features:
> - Allows installation onto GPT disks on x86 systems
> - Can do installations spanning multiple disks
> - Allows installation into jails
> - Eases PXE installation
> - Virtualization friendly: can install from a live system onto disk
>  images
> - Works on PowerPC
> - Streamlined system installation
> - More flexible scripting
> - Easily tweakable
> - All install CDs are live CDs
>
> Architecture
> ------------
> BSDInstall is a set of tools that are called in sequence by a master script.
> These tools are, for example, the partition editor, the thing that fetches
> the distributions from the network, the thing that untars them, etc. Since
> these are just called in sequence from a shell script, a scripted
> installation can easily replace them with other things, (e.g. hard-coded
> gpart commands), leave steps out, add new ones, or interleave additional
> system modifications.
>
> Status
> ------
> This provides functionality most similar to the existing sysinstall
> 'Express' track. It installs working, bootable systems you can ssh into
> immediately after reboot on i386, amd64, sparc64, powerpc, and powerpc64.
> There is untested support for pc98. The final architecture on which we use
> sysinstall, ia64, is currently unsupported, because I don't know how to set
> up booting on those systems -- patches to solve this are very much welcome.
>
> There are still some missing features that I would like to see in the
> release, but these do not significantly impact the functionality of the
> installer. Some will be addressed before merging to HEAD, in particular the
> lack of a man page for bsdinstall. Others, like configuration of wireless
> networking and ZFS installation, can happen between merge and release. The
> test ISOs are also lacking a ports tree at the moment, which is a statement
> about the slow upload speed of my DSL line and not about the final layout of
> releases.
>
> Please send any questions, comments, or patches you may have, and please be
> aware when replying that this email has been cross-posted to three lists.
> Technical discussion (bug reports, for instance) should be directed to the
> freebsd-sysinstall list only. Most other discussion belongs on -sysinstall
> and -current.
> -Nathan

Clean new virtualbox on FreeBSD host.

Install -> German ISO-8859-1 -> "vbox" -> Guided -> ad0 -> Partition
-> "You have canceled an installation step"

Actually I didn't cancel anything :)

After using the entire disk and installing some distributions it hangs
waiting for the root password, it won't continue when I just press
enter.
The screen output looks garbled by a LOR. The screen waiting for the
root pw is garbled too. Seems like it's not doing a carriage return,
just line-feeds. I tried this again a second time and everything
worked normally.