Modern FreeBSD Installer?

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On Sun, 26 Apr 2009 02:18:55 +0200, Erik Trulsson <ertr1013 at student.uu.se> wrote:
> Better would be to check (somehow) for the presence of a keyboard and
> a screen.  If those are not present forget about X.  If they are
> present then the user at least has a possibility of using X.

Deferring to the user all the decisions that are impossible to make with
a reasonable chance of doing the Right Thing for everyone seems ok too.

Solaris has been shipping for quite some time with an installer that can
run on serial consoles, an installer that can launch a simple
terminal-based session under X11, and an installer that can launch a
Java GUI version in all its bloated glory.

The decision of which installer to launch is left to the user who sits
on the boot console, who is presented with a simple menu like:

    +-------------------------------------------------------+
    |                                                       |
    |  Please select installation type (default = 3): _     |
    |                                                       |
    |       1. Text-only console installation.              |
    |                                                       |
    |       2. Terminal based GUI installation.             |
    |                                                       |
    |       3. Dialog driven GUI installation.              |
    |                                                       |
    +-------------------------------------------------------+

There is also a timeout that launches the user-friendly GUI dialogs
after a few seconds.

I think this is a reasonable approach to the problem of which
installation mode to launch.  The default is `user friendly', there is a
timeout so the installer won't get stuck forever in the prompt, and
there is still an option for a plain console-based installation for
everyone who wants to go that way.