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To: uhclem@nemesis.lonestar.org (Frank Durda IV)
Subject: Re: X for install (was: Re: syscons driver) 
Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
In-reply-to: Your message of Sat, 30 Dec 1995 00:17:00 +0700
Date: Mon, 01 Jan 1996 20:55:59 -0700
From: Warner Losh <imp@village.org>
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: [27]Come on guys, why is it that you dont get it that there are LOADS of
: [27]users out there that either don't have the HW or simply dont want to
: [27]run X for various reasons (I'm not one of them I use X :) :) )
: 
: I agree.  If the installation requires X, you can also kiss goodbye to
: all those people with 5Meg and 4Meg systems who are able to install now.
: They'll just pop over to Linux or SCO or whatever that doesn't have
: those memory requirements, and will come up in the simple hardware
: they have. 

Maybe I'm getting into this a couple of days late...

However, I'd kill to have a nice install/upgrade procedure that I can
run from X.  This is "can run from X" rather than "must run with X".
I'd rather see fewer screens to go through to get the stuff installed,
and just click on what I want.  The curses interface is nice, but I
also want the ability to have something look at /cdrom/packages/*.tgz
and give me a nicer way to install them than pkg_add (which is nice,
but still involves more typing than just a couple of clicks here or
there).

Maybe I'm too close to the X world, but it would be nice.  It would be
equally nice if I had enough spare time to commit to this project that
it would happen.  I have some kludgy beginings in OI that I had to
abadon when I left the seller of OI's employment (I had hoped to ship
out a monsterly huge static binary that would show proof of concept).

Anyway, if it is still bugging me after I get some hardware I have an
OS (it is a strange MIPS box), and after my current "side" contract
expires, I may try to work up something with Perl/Tk to show people
what I'm talking about.

I also agree this is made a low priority by the huge disk space
requirements that aren't there on a boot floopy (but could be there on
a CDROM or something like that).  It is further made a low priority by
the "raising of the bar" for the memory starved systems out there (8M
would unlikely be enough given that we don't have swap until "late" in
the install process).  Finally, the difficulty most people would face
in bringing up X would likely make it unsuitable (but doing the
install at VGA resolutions like MS does with Windows might not make it
too horrible).

Warner