Re: [ANNOUNCE] DragonFly BSD Installer RC1

[Ivan Voras <ivoras@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Chris Pressey wrote:
> Thanks, everyone, for the reports!  The installer has now reached RC1
> (plus a few bugfixes) and many of the issues mentioned have been
> addressed.  As before, an ISO image can be downloaded from:


> An example configuration file can be found here:
>
> http://freebsd0.sitetronics.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/tissue/scripts/conf/pfi.conf.sample

Ok, this is nice to have.


> This is actually a problem with fdisk.  To see the problem, pick a disk

This is bad, but as you say, it'll probably go away.

About the (curses) installer:
	- Where did the keyboard/font selection dialogs go? (though they're not 
strictly necessary in many cases, it would be nice to have them at least 
in the post-install configure step)
	- Navigation through the options is imo greatly improved. (I thik there 
are still UI issues, but this can wait after the 1.0)
	- It's very nice to have the consoles available! But: when I tried to 
login on a console with a login prompt on it, it seemd to want to start 
the installer again. Goin back to the original installer console and 
doing some operations (this was after the "base install" phase) seemed 
to crash the installer backend (signal 11), with the front-end still 
running (and stuck because it couldn't to anything)
	- The partition editor still allowed me to create a 1MB /tmp :)
	- It still doesn't show used/free space information (if at all 
possible, this would be good to have in 1.0, but not extremely necessary)


This is the first time I tried the 'web installer', and WOW! I'm VERY 
impressed by its existence and working! I award you 10 out of 10 geek 
points :)

Now, this is a nice major feature, as it could enable users to do a 
completely headless install, via nothing more than a web browser. The 
only thing that has to be carefully brainstormed is how to do the 
initial network setup/ifconfig before users can point their browsers to 
the installer. Here are my thoughts on it:

- to have an application/part of setup that aims to make an educated 
guess about what to do. For example:
	- if there is no keyboard present (careful: USB devices!), or no video 
(vga) adapter, and no signal/handshake from serial port, it's certainly 
a headless install; go to network phase
	- even if the above devices are present, it still could be a headless 
setup. Maybe do something like this: if there's a keyboard present, beep 
three times, and wait for the user to press "F5" or something if he 
wishes to do headless setup (and go to network phase), or after 5 
seconds or so, start the curses installer

	the network phase:
	- one way to do it is to try DHCP and see if the computer gets an IP 
adress, but! how to communicate that address to the user doing the install?
	- maybe to have a predefined address (like 10.0.0.10), and users that 
do a lot of headless installs will have a dedicated nework or NIC for 
this purpose
	- or, if the keyboard is present, to signal the user (via the beeps) to 
enter an ip adress and mask blindly?
	- or, a hierarhical fallback on all three?

Resolving this could certainly be a nice feather in the cap for DFly...