From owner-freebsd-hackers Sun Apr 7 13:20:00 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id NAA28927 for hackers-outgoing; Sun, 7 Apr 1996 13:20:00 -0700 (PDT) Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.211]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id NAA28918 Sun, 7 Apr 1996 13:19:57 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id NAA00478; Sun, 7 Apr 1996 13:14:15 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199604072014.NAA00478@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: Netscape install of FreeBSD To: hsu@freefall.freebsd.org (Jeffrey Hsu) Date: Sun, 7 Apr 1996 13:14:15 -0700 (MST) Cc: gpalmer@freefall.freebsd.org, hackers@freefall.freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <199604070158.RAA01135@freefall.freebsd.org> from "Jeffrey Hsu" at Apr 6, 96 05:58:52 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > > specifically, Jordan and I talked a bit about using a WWW browser and > > CGI scripts to create the configuration manager for post-install stuff > > like adding/deleting users, changing /etc/sysconfig, etc. > > I meant the install install, that is, click a button from Netscape > running in Windows or Linux and it goes off and partitions your drive, > downloads FreeBSD, installs it, sets up the boot manager, asks you some > questions and writes the appropriate files onto the newly created BSD ufs, > then reboots. > > This is an example of network software distribution which everyone seems > to want to do with the web. This is hard. It's hard because thee is no standard extension for UNIX executables, like there is for DOS, and it's hard because the default "mailcap" or other mapping for running executables from a download is only there for the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser, from what I can tell. On the whole, if you had a netboot.exe that could work with all the cards, and the ability to boot as an anonymous client of a boothost that is well known and well connected, across a router, then it's barely possible to do with Microsoft's browser. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.