Sysinstall is still inadequate after all of these years
Robert Watson
rwatson at FreeBSD.org
Thu Jul 3 08:28:33 UTC 2008
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 :-).
Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge
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