Feature proposal: Rebootless Installer

[Martin Sourada]

On Tue, 2009-07-14 at 02:04 -0600, Douglas McClendon wrote:
> 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.
> 
<snip>
Hi Doug,

I think this is an interesting idea and I don't see why you it should
not be done (if you are willing to do the work). It would also IMHO be a
cool killing feature (from marketing POV) ;-) My idea of how this would
be implemented best is:

1. do the installation
2. on the last page instead of plain "thank you for installing" and
"exit" (I don't recall what exactly is on the last anaconda page) would
be "thank you for installing" and "start using the installed system
now", "continue using {Desktop, KDE, ...} Live" and "reboot" buttons. 

If you pushed the "start using the installed system now" you'd start
using the system from hdd and the live CD/DVD would be ejected. Also it
would be probably good idea to pop-up a notification icon that suggests
reboot (like package-kit does for e.g. kernel updates).

If you pushed the "continue using {Desktop, KDE, ...} Live" it would
just quit the installer and suggest reboot in a similar case as before.

If you pushed the "reboot one" it would quit the installer and forced a
reboot (and perhaps prompted the user to save their work).

Of course it could be made into radiobuttons instead of buttons with
just one "Finish" or whatever button.

The default would stay "continue using {Desktop, KDE, ...} Live".

This would of course work only for Live Spins, I don't see any reason to
try to push this to the "standard" DVD or network installs.

Also you'd need to properly handle firstboot in this case, which would
be bypassed. Me thinks firstboot should be purged anyway, but it still
exists and you need to be aware of it.

Just my €0.02,
Martin
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