Feature proposal: Rebootless Installer

[Douglas McClendon]

Martin Sourada wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-07-14 at 02:04 -0600, Douglas McClendon wrote:
>> Fedorans,
>>
>> Can you spare 50 or 100K?  If you can spare 100K/700M in the forthcoming 
>> Fedora-12 LiveCD, I can provide you with a rebootless installation 
>> experience.
>>
>> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/RebootlessInstaller
>>
>> The short story is that you boot the LiveCD/USB, run the installation, 
>> and then, instead of rebooting into the installed OS, you are already 
>> looking at and using it.
>>
> <snip>
> Hi Doug,
> 
> I think this is an interesting idea and I don't see why you it should
> not be done (if you are willing to do the work). It would also IMHO be a
> cool killing feature (from marketing POV) ;-) My idea of how this would
> be implemented best is:

Hi Martin, thanks for the great feedback.  As you can see from the 
project page, I already have a simple/experimental implementation, which 
I would like to get accepted more or less as is, perhaps prioritizing 
more on functionality for F12 than features.  But you brought up some 
good ideas...

> 1. do the installation
> 2. on the last page instead of plain "thank you for installing" and
> "exit" (I don't recall what exactly is on the last anaconda page) would
> be "thank you for installing" and "start using the installed system
> now", "continue using {Desktop, KDE, ...} Live" and "reboot" buttons. 

That is more or less what I have, or rather, I have a big text widget 
with the simplest line of text currently.  The text for the intro and 
final pages, and other places, I definitely expect to hone based on 
feedback like yours.  After the feature is accepted, and even before, 
I'll gladly accept patches :)


> If you pushed the "start using the installed system now" you'd start
> using the system from hdd and the live CD/DVD would be ejected. Also it
> would be probably good idea to pop-up a notification icon that suggests
> reboot (like package-kit does for e.g. kernel updates).

How about a mention in the intro or success page that mentions the 
minimal root-on-lvm performance hit until the next reboot.  Other than 
that, there is no reason to suggest the reboot.  Or rather, just let 
packagekit do what packagekit does, and get an updated kernel, and then 
give the suggest like normal, for the normal reason?

> 
> If you pushed the "continue using {Desktop, KDE, ...} Live" it would
> just quit the installer and suggest reboot in a similar case as before.
> 
> If you pushed the "reboot one" it would quit the installer and forced a
> reboot (and perhaps prompted the user to save their work).

Adding an optional reboot button to the success page is certainly a 
reasonable idea, fairly trivial to add.


> Of course it could be made into radiobuttons instead of buttons with
> just one "Finish" or whatever button.
> 
> The default would stay "continue using {Desktop, KDE, ...} Live".
> 
> This would of course work only for Live Spins, I don't see any reason to
> try to push this to the "standard" DVD or network installs.

I agree, this is definitely a 'LiveOS' thing.

> 
> Also you'd need to properly handle firstboot in this case, which would
> be bypassed. Me thinks firstboot should be purged anyway, but it still
> exists and you need to be aware of it.

There really isn't that much there these days anyway.  See my reply to 
Colin for a discussion of that.

Thanks again for good design ideas,

peace...

-dmc