On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 8:35 AM, Jeremy Katz <katzj(a)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
--
martin.langhoff(a)gmail.com
martin(a)laptop.org -- School Server Architect
- ask interesting questions
- don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first
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