I'll add my comments, I'm sure others on the team can add some comments too. On 03/14/2009 10:24 AM, solarflow99 wrote:
I was just hoping to share some thoughts on the new text mode changes. I have used text mode since the beginning, and often depended on it more than the clunky GUI mode. Many times the need for text mode is because of a ram shortage, so VNC insn't going to help. Can we give consideration to the following:
While I understand that you use the text mode installer in the situations you describe, the big problem for us has been maintaining two installer interfaces. They were never equivalent and almost always had their own bugs. Our goal has been to reduce the amount of code we have to maintain in the text mode installer rather than increase it. We chose text mode as the mode to reduce because we already have the GUI interactive mode and we have kickstart. Text mode seemed redundant.
- Advanced Partitioning. Can we at least allow 1 thing from the second screen, to choose partitions to install on? Like /, /boot, etc. no creating partitions, raid, or LVM. maybe an option to run fdisk could even be brought back?
Kickstart can do this. Even if you want to manually lay out your partitions, you can run parted or sfdisk in %pre and then use the part command in kickstart with the --onpart switch.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Kickstart
- Package Selection. Is allowing only package groups feasible without much difficulty? This package lists are common arent they?
The problem here is where do you stop? If groups are available, why stop there? Someone will ask for individual package selections after that and pretty soon we get a complex set of text mode screens to do what we already do in the graphical mode and in kickstart.
The %packages section in a kickstart file can do what you're looking for. Groups specified with '@', packages removed with '-'.
- When text mode is selected with "linux text", I think the dialog that recommends vnc should explain WHY, at least for now. So instead of the 1 line explanation, something more like this one: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Documentation_Beats_Installer
This is probably a good idea. I thought the dialog box had good text, but I can't say I've looked at it in a while.
- Any guess as to to how much ram requirement this will save?
How much ram what will save?
I guess we could now consider text mode to be for advanced users only, so it could be changed with that in mind, just basic functionality should do.
I would think advanced users would want to be using kickstart. Kickstart has always offered more than what our text mode interface has been able to do.
Construct your own kickstart file using system-config-kickstart, starting with /root/anaconda-ks.cfg from any other installation, or just write one on your own.
-- 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
