On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 8:35 AM, Jeremy Katz katzj@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