Date: Sat, 7 Jan 1995 19:59:20 -0800 (PST) From: "Justin T. Gibbs" <gibbs@estienne.CS.Berkeley.EDU> To: freebsd-hackers@freefall.cdrom.com Subject: Re: Graphical installations and such Message-ID: <199501080359.TAA21255@estienne.cs.berkeley.edu>
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In my opinion, much more important than pushing for a graphical installation program at the moment is the need to increase the chance of the first boot of FreeBSD to work 99.9% of the time and run on 99.9% of the machines out there. What I mean by this is: 1) VM86 Bios mode disk driver as the method of installation, and as a viable alternative for folks waiting for their drive to be supported. Linux has this. 2) Externalizing the probes from all the drivers and doing the probes (like NT, OS/2, and Windows 96^H5) once you've got the machine up and can say to the user "Hey, I'm about to look for the hardware you have installed...if I freeze, this is what you do... you can also bypass the probe and tell me what you have". 3) Take the probe information and configure a kernel appropriately. 4) Ask about the type of ethernet device people have (link2 saga). 5) Have a shell availible!!! Seriously, the text based install tools are not sufficienly polished to warant a graphical install at this time. 2.0 was by far the hardest release of FreeBSD for me to install because I wanted a shell, and whenever NCFTP froze, you had no choice but to reboot! Having ^C and ^Z reboot the machine was a nice touch too (seeing as anyone who has ANY Unix experience will try this if something goes wrong). This is not to bag on the 2.0 install tools. I think they are a great start, but they do alienate the seasoned hacker and do not provide enough flexibility yet. -- Justin T. Gibbs ============================================== TCS Instructional Group - Programmer/Analyst 1 Cory | Po | Danube | Volga | Parker | Torus ==============================================
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