From owner-freebsd-hackers Sat Jan 7 19:26:49 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.9/8.6.6) id TAA06080 for hackers-outgoing; Sat, 7 Jan 1995 19:26:49 -0800 Received: from estienne.cs.berkeley.edu (estienne.CS.Berkeley.EDU [128.32.42.147]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.9/8.6.6) with ESMTP id TAA06074 for ; Sat, 7 Jan 1995 19:26:45 -0800 Received: (from gibbs@localhost) by estienne.cs.berkeley.edu (8.6.9/8.6.9) id TAA21255 for freebsd-hackers@freefall.cdrom.com; Sat, 7 Jan 1995 19:59:20 -0800 From: "Justin T. Gibbs" Message-Id: <199501080359.TAA21255@estienne.cs.berkeley.edu> Subject: Re: Graphical installations and such To: freebsd-hackers@freefall.cdrom.com Date: Sat, 7 Jan 1995 19:59:20 -0800 (PST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 1681 Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk 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 ==============================================