Horrible installer

[Damien Fleuriot]

On 1/20/12 9:36 AM, Fbsd8 wrote:
> Damien Fleuriot wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>> _______________________________________________
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>>
>>
> 
> 
> so post your script so others can use it

I'm afraid it's not that simple, the PHP page that generates the
customized lines to copy/paste for installations is integrated into our
user management interface (for reasons I'll skip).

I can't post that since it's corporate stuff.


However you've got a rough sketch of how we do it at
- http://my.gd/bsd.htm

and a much more complete procedure based on it from Ollivier Robert at:
- http://www.keltia.net/howtos/freebsd-dedibox