Here are some scenarios to consider: * Suppose that I'm blind. I put in the CD, reboot, and wait the 5 minutes I generally wait to get it past post[1]. Then I carefully start typing the necessary kernel options for my braille reader into the syslinux prompt I expect to be there...
Even once I learn about the timeout, installing Debian is going to suck a lot more than before for me. * Suppose that the machine is being booted by a rack monkey at the data center. If it's set up like my data center, this means they put the CD in the front of the rack, power on the machine, then run 200 feet around to the back of the rack -- only to find that the crash cart with the display isn't hooked up to the right machine. So they switch it to the right one. Meanwhile, I want them to boot with "auto=true" to avoid walking them through the whole install over the phone, and am subsequently quite confused when I tell them to type that, and they say that it replies with "Elektu landon, teritorion au aeron" and some other strange words. Can you figure out what happened based on the above description? :-) Could you figure it out over the phone? While being charged $x/minute for a call from Europe to the US? * My grandnephew Kai Runyon[2] is here visiting. He's 2, and he likes to pound on keyboards and flip switches. He finds my power switch. Then he finds my keyboard. I come out of a programming haze to find my media server formatting its home directory thanks to the d-i CD I just had it burn. Ok, granted, the timeout only saved him one well-placed enter, but it's not unheard of for my home network to have preseed setups enabled that let this whole scenario happen with only a few keystrokes. * My kiosk machine only has a user-accessible touchscreen, the keyboard is locked away to avoid all those easily implantable keylogger chips, and other problems. I leave an installation CD in it so that it can be quickly reinstalled if something goes wrong, or weekly (just in case). One day I decide to switch it to this new version of the lenny CD, which happens to be the one where g-i becomes the default installer. This also happens to be the one that a tricky user of the kiosk uses to intercept a lot of credit card numbers, after running through the whole g-i install using only the keypad, to get root. The liklihood of these varies, but they do illistrate the range of users that we have to consider when trying to make this kind of change. -- see shy jo [1] This may be hideously unrealistic, but you get the idea. [2] Hi future Kai doing your first self-google! :-)
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