Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2008 21:36:25 -0700 From: soralx@cydem.org To: fjwcash@gmail.com Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Sysinstall is still inadequate after all of these years Message-ID: <20080707213625.69bb0bf4@soralx> In-Reply-To: <b269bc570807071155u364225dfi298be797b728dca4@mail.gmail.com> References: <784966050807021123l267aa20en39eb513c12c90ad2@mail.gmail.com> <20080702235800.H47773@fledge.watson.org> <486C8700.5020100@lobraun.de> <20080703092511.T69986@fledge.watson.org> <486F8C57.9050908@wubethiopia.com> <b269bc570807071155u364225dfi298be797b728dca4@mail.gmail.com>
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> Hear, hear! To be honest, this is the only bit about the current > sysinstall that I really dislike: the fact that it can be used for > post-installation configuration and package installation. This causes > no end of trouble for newbies, who seem to view sysinstall as "The One > True System Admin Tool" and try to use it for configuring/installing > everything. Too many times, on various BSD forums, I've had to walk > people through cleaning up /etc/rc.conf and showing them how to > correctly install/configure things (using standard FreeBSD tools), > since they used sysinstall for everything. That may be true, but sysinstall did help me do basic, essentical configuration of my very first installed system, and a few installs after that (until I learned about /etc/rc.conf et al). And I never regarded it as The One True Sysadmin Tool, because I did not use Linux distros, thus never got used to their ways. It's just that the simple configuration menu really helped me to get a useful system running in a few minutes (though menu items certainly could make use of more verbose descriptions). And then I could play with the working system and learn ways to configure it. So, IMHO, a basic curses system configuration utility is still needed, and should be run after sysinstall or it should tell the user how to run it (maybe in motd, or sysinstall itself?). > IMO, the installer should allow you to partition the disk(s), format > the partition(s), install the OS, configure a user, and reboot the > system. Anything beyond that should be handled by the OS tools, from > within the installed and running OS. > > The tricky part will be getting the disk slicing, slice partitioning, > and filesystem formatting to work reliably, with all the power of > FreeBSD's GEOM modules, and ZFS. [SorAlx] ridin' VS1400
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