Suggestions for the Installer (regarding network installs)

[Jeremy Katz]

On Sun, 2003-10-12 at 05:12, Stephan Windischmann wrote:
> It seems as if the netinstall function is only there as an afterthought
> (or maybe I'm just used to Debian).
> Instead of a 4MB boot CD that has to download the installer itself, a
> dedicated Fedora Netinstall CD (~100-150MB) that has the graphical
> installer and perhaps a minimal file system on it would be really
> helpful for those that don't want to get all 3 CD's.

Actually, the rescuecd.iso can also be used for kicking off an install
and has all of the second stage.  Installing packages from FTP/HTTP with
the graphical installer is a new feature -- I'm guessing using the
rescuecd.iso to kick off an install will get more popular in the future
:-)  Graphical network installs in the past have been restricted to NFS
where you just loopback mount the second stage off the NFS mount and
don't have to do the large download.

> Having to enter the FTP mirror details by hand isn't especially user
> friendly either, and it doesn't really fit together with the rest of the
> Fedora installer, which is excellent.

The problem with this (historically) is the lack of an updated, reliable
mirror list in a location with the bandwidth to support being probed
during install.  There's also a slight problem with correlating what
your boot media matches to where to install from, but that's probably a
solvable technical problem if there was movement on the first.

> Also, would it be possible to do a netinstall of rawhide directly,
> instead of having to first install the latest beta/release and then
> upgrading to it? I'm a software version junky. ;)

We're looking at turning on installer images for rawhide.  I've been
reluctant to do so just because there are nights when things are broken
because of typos that don't catch them until the next day and then
having people file bugs for three days could be annoying, but we'll come
up with some way of dealing with that when it starts to become a problem
;-)

Cheers,

Jeremy