Feature proposal: Rebootless Installer

[Douglas McClendon]

Fedorans,

Can you spare 50 or 100K?  If you can spare 100K/700M in the forthcoming 
Fedora-12 LiveCD, I can provide you with a rebootless installation 
experience.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/RebootlessInstaller

The short story is that you boot the LiveCD/USB, run the installation, 
and then, instead of rebooting into the installed OS, you are already 
looking at and using it.

I just threw together a decent first pass at a feature page, with all 
the relevent info, as well as a couple links to youtube videos showing 
the complete user experience.  Or, if you are the adventurous kind with 
an idle test system (obviously with no important unbacked up data), simply

a) boot an f11-i686 livecd or usb, with an internet connection
b) firefox http://viros.org/rebootless
c) click the i386 rpm link, and submit to packagekit
d) do any partitioning beforehand with fdisk, or whatever gui tool (is 
palimpsest really supposed to be able to repartition?)
e) launch the new desktop icon
f) run the installer, simply selecting target root/boot/swap partitions
g) enjoy the coolness that is rebootless installation, and my gratitude 
for being one of the first, if not the second tester :)

I would obviously love to see this in F12 even though it could use quite 
a bit of polish.  It is fairly important that it go in sooner rather 
than later, as when unionfs percolates to fedora, this feature may no 
longer be technically possible.  In the event the feature were wildly 
popular, and sticks around, obviously integration with anaconda would be 
next, i.e. simply a checkbox before beginning installation stating 
whether you want rebootless instead of traditional.

In any event, I'd love to hear what people think.  I suppose if space is 
the issue, it could even be a feature just getting the package into the 
fedora repos so that it could be advertised, with users just needing an 
internet connection, and not having to see a complaint about lack of 
signature on the package.  But cmon, can you spare 100K?  (50 of that is 
ego/logo I can probably part with :)

peace...

-dmc