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To: bakul@BitBlocks.com
cc: asami@FreeBSD.ORG (Satoshi Asami), ports@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: PREFIX with X11 ports 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 22 Aug 1996 00:06:00 PDT."
             <199608220706.AAA27034@bsd.prognet.com> 
Date: Thu, 22 Aug 1996 09:16:47 -0700
Message-ID: <1120.840730607@time.cdrom.com>
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
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> Take it one step further and have a stripped down, standalone
> browser as your 2nd level boot! Think network appliances ;-))
> 
> The browser acts more like a visual shell with built-in help.  You
> still need all those nuts-and-bolts programs to do the actual
> installation.  HTML can make a decent glue language for such
> tasks.

Just to note - this is exactly the approach taken by a product I'm
working with (though they currently run with BSD/OS) and it's actually
not entirely the correct way to go about it.

Using lynx, or even the full-color-with-HP-style-help-buttons
alternative they wrote (which they've given me), actually makes for a
very klunky and somewhat painful-to-use interface and most of their
customers don't seem to like it all that much.  My opinion is that
rather than throw the user into a crippled browser based install
initially, you should use libdialog (or something similar) in the
"core install" which only gets you up as far as having your network up
or, if you are using a CDROM, into a CDROM based installation which
includes an X server.  Then you switch over to using the browser of
your choice to take things the rest of the way.

> PS: Some day I'd want to do all system admin stuff this way including
> installing new packages and configuring a new kernel.

You bet!  This is all very much part of my plans for "sysinstall, the
next generation" :-)

					Jordan