progress from kickstart scripts

Chris Lumens clumens at redhat.com
Wed Aug 8 16:51:41 UTC 2007


You may be interested to know that the long-standing bug of being able
to indicate progress in a kickstart %post script is now in MODIFIED.
This bug is:

   http://bugzilla.redhat.com/147109

What I've done is add the zenity program to the stage2 image.  This is
sort of like dialog - it's a small program that you provide options to
and it displays a GTK widget corresponding to those options.  The return
value or output of the program contains whatever the user did with the
widget.  This should give you the capability to display progress bars
for especially large or slow %pre and %post scripts.  The man page lists
all the options you've got to work with.

Problems:

- It's kind of ugly.  I don't think I care all that much.
- I've only tested with %pre scripts, because rawhide is having problems
  today.
- It only works for graphical installs, because it's a graphical
  program.
- I don't think this will work in chrooted %post scripts.  You may want
  to experiment with the $DISPLAY variable and all that to see if you
  can trick it into working.
- This gives you guys all sorts of other widgets to use in your scripts,
  even allowing for interactive forms and the like.  This should lead to
  even more complicated and bizarre kickstart files.

Please try this stuff out in the next build of anaconda and let me know
if there are any problems.  Enjoy.

- Chris




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