On Friday, 23 בJanuary 2009, Chris Lumens wrote:
- If the graphical installer doesn't work, the fix is not to have a
completely different path to go down. The fix is to fix graphical
installs. Having said this, we still do have work arounds possible.
You can always add xdriver=vesa as a boot parameter if the normal driver
for your card doesn't work under X. My latest patch to the list makes
it more obvious that you can do this.
I beg to digress, as text mode installation has more important roles than
working around broken X.
Two use cases:
* A small/old-hardware server without enough RAM.
I lately installed two such hosts, one is an old Pentium used as
firewall. The other is a small server used in a school (which now
has its RAM upgraded, but wasn't few months ago during install) --
In both cases X or vnc install was not possible, but both has Fedora
up and running (one F8, later upgraded to F10, the other a fresh
F10 install).
* A capable server where we don't want no X (e.g: minimizing security
exposure).
Yes, we could install it with X and remove it after the installation
but it's pretty lame. Yes, we would prefer to do a kickstart
install, but sometimes it's problematic -- think about a first
Linux server in a small Windows-centric environment --
you don't necessarily have full cooperation of the network gods,
sometimes you can't even talk to them (outsourced network management).
IMHO, the idea to minimize the text install is very good. When deciding
in what features to include during such an install, the basic question
should be -- can this be added/configured after the install?
For example, I don't see any problem in totally cutting the UI for
software selection step and installing only @Base (or what kickstart says).
In interactive mode, the admin can always do a yum install (or groupinstall)
later.
However, missing an important feature that cannot be fixed after the
installation (e.g: LVM, encrypted partitions for the installed partitions)
is simply a bug -- again the UI doesn't have to pretty since I'm talking
about a corner case, but it should be *possible* to install in such cases.
One last note about the difficulty of squeezing LVM definitions into
a text UI. This looks hard if we assume everything should be put
into the same dialog box. If we split it to steps (VG's, PV's for each VG,
LV's for each VG), it should be easy (not the code, the UI design ;-)