New installation script

[Nathan Whitehorn]

On 08/06/11 12:18, Garrett Wollman wrote:
> In article<4E3D55FD.7090803 at freebsd.org>, nwhitehorn at freebsd.org writes:
>> I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to. Whenever you add a /
>> partition on a partitioning scheme that requires a boot partition (APM,
>> GPT on some platforms), the installer asks you if you want to add a boot
>> partition. The auto-partitioner does this automatically. It does not
>> reuse any existing boot partition for two reasons:
>> - It has no way to know the other boot partition was correctly set up
>> and so would need to reinitialize it.
>> - There is no guarantee that it is even related to FreeBSD. On APM
>> disks, we share a boot partition type with OS X and Linux.
> Having just been through this, I can only say that neither of these
> arguments apply when the boot partition exists only in the memory of
> the partition editor and was never on the (freshly initialized) disk.
> I was a bit taken aback when I deleted and recreated the / partition
> (since I didn't want the "everything in one partition" layout it
> defaulted to) and it wanted to create *another* boot partition.

That's a hard thing to check. The boot partition is not just in the 
memory of the installer -- the internal state before commit is 
maintained in the kernel by geom. I can try to find a way around it, but 
it won't necessarily be easy.

> Another issue I had was that it was unclear which keymap I was
> expected to choose.  I initially chose "traditional Unix workstation",
> which was unusable.  (Never did find the control or escape key, which
> made vi particularly difficult to use.)  The default selection in the
> keymap dialog ought to be "don't screw with it" rather than an option
> which is not obviously correct.  Forcing users to set a system
> timezone is probably a good idea, too; I had not noticed that it never
> asked me for one until I ran the "date" command and found my system
> running in UTC.

You are free to press "cancel" at the keymap selection. That dialog is 
also identical to what kbdmap and sysinstall do (in fact, all it is 
doing is running kbdmap). Also, it does ask you to set a time zone, 
although it does allow you to cancel time zone setup. It does that 
immediately before asking which system daemons you want run at startup 
and after network configuration. It also gives you a chance to do that 
at the end of the installation.
-Nathan