Autostep not working?

[Jeremy Katz]

On Mon, 2006-05-15 at 13:03 -0600, Philip Prindeville wrote:
> Jeremy Katz wrote:
> > On Mon, 2006-05-15 at 11:03 -0600, Philip Prindeville wrote:
> >> Jeremy Katz wrote:
> >>> On Sat, 2006-05-13 at 10:51 -0600, Philip Prindeville wrote:
> >>>> Is it my imagination, or does "autostep" not work with "text"
> >>>> (but only "graphical")?
> >>>>         
> >>> autostep has always been graphical only (and I believe documented as
> >>> such).  Making it otherwise is somewhere between difficult and
> >>> impossible
> >>>       
> >> Why?  All it does is continue with the supplies values without waiting
> >> for the user to enter new values...  that's orthogonal to using a GUI or
> >> a simple ASCII interface...
> >>     
> > Because there's no way to tell the underlying toolkit "press this button
> > now" with the text-mode interface.
> >
> > But in the case you're trying to achieve, why do you even need or want
> > autostep?  Really... it's handy for debugging that screens "look" right
> > (especially in different languages), but for actual automated installs,
> > what are you gaining by having steps that take no time pop up and wait
> > on the screen?
> >
> As opposed to what?  There's "interactive", and there's "autostep", right?
> 
> If you're using "text" mode, there's no way to get an unattended install 
> that I can think of...

There's normal kickstart.  It goes through and will prompt for missing
information, but otherwise do an automated install.

On top of that are two additional modes.

"interactive" mode will stop on screens and allow you to modify/confirm
the information provided in the kickstart config.  Note that there are
some weird caveats that make this different from a normal interactive
installation.

Then, there is "autostep" mode which takes the information in the
kickstart config and actually goes through the UI steps in graphical
mode pausing on each.  It largely exists to allow automatic
screenshot'ing to occur.  Note that with the advent of tools such as
dogtail, autostep will probably go away at some point in the not too far
future.

Jeremy