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,
Lothar
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