Horrible installer (was: Re: FreeBSD 9)

[Damien Fleuriot]

On 1/19/12 3:25 AM, Allan McKinnon wrote:
> 
> I finally got to install FreeBSD 9 onto my computer and noticed that the installer is now different.  It seems to me that it forces you into doing extra steps that I was comfortable doing on my own.  I really enjoyed the old installer because then I had complete control over how I tweaked my computer during and after the install.  I am surprised that there is no gui present while installing FreeBSD because it feels more like Ubuntu or a windows install (somewhat).  Please, please, please take this nightmare away and bring the beloved installer that was before FreeBSD 9.
> Thank you for listening.
> Allan 		 	   		  _______________________________________________


Erm, you have to realize the new installer was discussed at length here,
when 9.0 was still under development/beta/prerelease.

Then would have been the best time to voice your frustration over the
new scheme.



Alternatively, you could do like me and install entirely by hand:

- boot an MFSBSD image (thanks mm@ )
- partition your disks from there (see http://my.gd/bsd.htm for a rough
sketch on how to use gpart)
- fetch the 9.0 archives in .txz (tar.xz) format
- unpack archives with xz -d
- untar archived to the mountpoint with your new filesystems (eg: tar xf
base.tar -C /mnt)
- customize configuration files (rc.conf, fstab, root's password or SSH
key, sshd_config to allow root login temporarily)

And then most of all, profit ;)



I've been doing installs this way first with 8.x (using the install
scripts on the CDROM) then now with 9.x unpacking the .txz archives.

I'm quite happy with it, the process is simple enough to document and
reproduce, and offers suitable customization options.

We've developed a tiny web interface here that lets us customize the
size, type and label of our GPT partitions, hostname, IP address, root
password and SSH accounts/keys to deploy on such newly installed machines.
The interface spits the whole wall of commands to paste once logged in
to the MFSBSD image to install the new OS and configure it.

Works like a charm really.