I tried it on a MacPro G5 (64-bit) with the "netinst" CD. At the
"boot:" prompt I entered "install desktop=xfce", then answered the
usual questions and watched it happily install xfce.
So that works.
I have an xfce-CD1 CD that I intend to try with "install
desktop=gnome" and see which desktop (xfce or gnome, or both?) it
installs. The problem that I foresee here is the the yaboot.conf file
on the xfce-CD1 already has its own clause <append="desktop=xfce --">
which may conflict with the user's.
I'll report on that later.
We may have to figure out how to only include the extra instructions
(about desktops) on the netinst CDs, which would be no real loss,
because all the other desktops have dedicated CD1's of their own.
I haven't tried it on a G4 (32-bit) machine yet. I'll report on that
later, too.
Thinking about 64-bit vs 32-bit, I don't think the code that prints
the "boot:" prompt (and the preceding boot.msg file) is aware of the
bit-width of the hardware. So we may have to either make the added
text more comprehensive to warn the user about "install desktop=kde"
vs "install32 desktop=kde", or find some other way of dealing with the
problem.
Which raises the question of do we dare make boot.msg any longer? It
may already be too long -- long enough that most folks won't bother to
read all of it, and miss something important.
An alternate approach would be to refer folks to the appropriate
section of the installation manual, where there should be a fully
comprehensive discussion of the available boot options and why you
might want to use them. Something like this:
The following desktop environments are available:
gnome, kde, xfce and lxde. The default is gnome.
If you prefer a different one, append
"desktop=<your choice>"
Details are discussed in the installer manual at
<URL>
Enjoy!
Rick
On Mar 7, 2013, at 11:55 PM, Rick Thomas wrote:
OK,
Sounds great!
I'll give it a try on a couple of old Macs over the weekend.
Enjoy!
Rick
On Mar 7, 2013, at 12:16 AM, Steve McIntyre wrote:
On Tue, Mar 05, 2013 at 12:49:54AM -0800, Rick Thomas wrote:
# cat /proc/cmdline # in the F2 console during the installation
ro ramdisk_size=10240 desktop=kde --
It installed kde as expected.
I'm not sure what the "--" is all about. It was not present when I
installed with the "netinst" CD and typed
expert desktop=xfce
at the "boot:" prompt. As noted, that installed xfce4. So the --
may not be strictly necessary.
Take a look at the stuff in /install/yaboot.conf on the install CDs.
I think that's where all this is originating from.
OK, cool. Thanks for confirming. I've taken your text, tweaked
slightly, and added it into debian-cd. I've also added some code to
work out the default desktop so we can list that. I'm building a
weekly powerpc set right now with the changes in - please test and
make sure all works OK?
I can see the code looks ok from here, but I don't have easy access
to
a powerpc machine to be able to check that text fits on screen
correctly, silly things like that...
--
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. st...@einval.com
Welcome my son, welcome to the machine.
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