Oron Peled wrote:
On Friday, 23 בJanuary 2009, Chris Lumens wrote:
- If the graphical installer doesn't work, the fix is not to have a
completely different path to go down. The fix is to fix graphical
installs. Having said this, we still do have work arounds possible.
You can always add xdriver=vesa as a boot parameter if the normal driver
for your card doesn't work under X. My latest patch to the list makes
it more obvious that you can do this.
I beg to digress, as text mode installation has more important roles than
working around broken X.
Two use cases:
* A small/old-hardware server without enough RAM.
I lately installed two such hosts, one is an old Pentium used as
firewall. The other is a small server used in a school (which now
has its RAM upgraded, but wasn't few months ago during install) --
In both cases X or vnc install was not possible, but both has Fedora
up and running (one F8, later upgraded to F10, the other a fresh
F10 install).
How is VNC not an option here? I assume you have another system at your
disposal aside from the one you are setting up. And if you are setting
up a server, I assume it also has a network interface. So again, how is
VNC not an option? Connect your laptop or workstation via a crossover
cable to the interface on the server you are installing to. Done.
* A capable server where we don't want no X (e.g: minimizing security
exposure).
Yes, we could install it with X and remove it after the installation
but it's pretty lame. Yes, we would prefer to do a kickstart
install, but sometimes it's problematic -- think about a first
Linux server in a small Windows-centric environment --
you don't necessarily have full cooperation of the network gods,
sometimes you can't even talk to them (outsourced network management).
IMHO, the idea to minimize the text install is very good. When deciding
in what features to include during such an install, the basic question
should be -- can this be added/configured after the install?
For example, I don't see any problem in totally cutting the UI for
software selection step and installing only @Base (or what kickstart says).
In interactive mode, the admin can always do a yum install (or groupinstall)
later.
However, missing an important feature that cannot be fixed after the
installation (e.g: LVM, encrypted partitions for the installed partitions)
is simply a bug -- again the UI doesn't have to pretty since I'm talking
about a corner case, but it should be *possible* to install in such cases.
One last note about the difficulty of squeezing LVM definitions into
a text UI. This looks hard if we assume everything should be put
into the same dialog box. If we split it to steps (VG's, PV's for each VG,
LV's for each VG), it should be easy (not the code, the UI design ;-)
The UI design isn't that easy for partitioning. It's already very
difficult in graphical installer. Our current interface starts to break
down and become useless when you have hundreds or thousands of disks. I
don't want to imagine what that would be like in text mode.
But even if we were able to scope the text mode partitioning UI to allow
us to implement an LVM interface in it, we've still done two things that
we don't want to do:
1) Created an entirely different user interface. Not just newt over
gtk, but different screens and text.
2) Limited what you can do in text mode, so what's the point in the
first place?
--
David Cantrell <dcantrell@xxxxxxxxxx>
Red Hat / Honolulu, HI
_______________________________________________
Anaconda-devel-list mailing list
Anaconda-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/anaconda-devel-list
