Pungi and a text-only F9 installer for XS

[Martin Langhoff]

On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 8:35 AM, Jeremy Katz <katzj at redhat.com> wrote:
>> Interesting. I always understood the text installer would be easier to
>> support in alt arches and embedded devices, etc. How do you plan to
>> support installs over serial port on headless boxes?
>
> Kickstart and vnc both exist.  Text mode limits you to 80x24, lots of
> problems supporting non-Latin languages, no input methods, poor
> toolkits, ..  the list could go on for a while.  You just can't provide
> the richness of user experience that's really needed to do some of the
> complex things that people want to do with an install in a text mode
> environment.  And those sorts of complex setups are a lot of times as
> common, if not more so, on all sorts of things like serial port sand
> headless boxes

I can understand the limitations you describe. Still, embedded devices
and headless boxes are a growing space IMHO, and they are definitely
the space I am working on, so I care about it.

X + VNC is a bit of an awkward setup, it eats ~300MB of installer
media space and uses a sizable amount of RAM too. Can it run over
serial? Media is getting cheaper, but it's odd to include all that
machinery when the target install will _not_ have X.

> Deprecated with the eventual plan that text mode exists only for
> a) Get you into VNC or X
> b) Kickstart progress and
> c) A "delete everything, install with the defaults, no questions really
> asked" mode (maybe)

Thanks - good to hear it's not going away. I will still need a working
text mode for the basics however. Am I *that* weird? ;-)

cheers,


m
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 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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