From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Jan 1 20:17:40 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id UAA27817 for hackers-outgoing; Mon, 1 Jan 1996 20:17:40 -0800 (PST) Received: from rah.star-gate.com (rah.star-gate.com [204.188.121.18]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id UAA27812 for ; Mon, 1 Jan 1996 20:17:35 -0800 (PST) Received: from rah.star-gate.com (localhost.v-site.net [127.0.0.1]) by rah.star-gate.com (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id UAA02207; Mon, 1 Jan 1996 20:17:09 -0800 Message-Id: <199601020417.UAA02207@rah.star-gate.com> X-Mailer: exmh version 1.6.2 7/18/95 To: Warner Losh cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: X for install (was: Re: syscons driver) In-reply-to: Your message of "Mon, 01 Jan 1996 20:55:59 MST." <199601020356.UAA23636@rover.village.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Mon, 01 Jan 1996 20:17:09 -0800 From: "Amancio Hasty Jr." Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk I think that an X installation be that being X oriented or firing up an X server will only happen till someone around here really gets upset with the current curses implementation and the lame excuse of that it does not fit in a boot floppy. If we have a cdrom and the booted kernel can access it then by all means lets use it !!! In my case, I am willing to tolerate the system installation cause I don't do it that often. Amancio >>> Warner Losh said: > : [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 >