On Tuesday 09 January 2007 08:21, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
>
> 3) The largest complaint about sysinstall is that it's not graphical. The
> problem is that a graphical installation program has some -severe-
> constraints on it. First, it has to work in ALL instances. That means,
> 640x480x16 colors VGA screen. You have a lot of people out there
> installing on systems that have, for example, monitors with inadequate
> horizontal/vertical frequency ranges and very capabable video cards,
> unless you force the X-server to use the original VGA resolution, it's
> going to overdrive those monitors and the user is going to see a black
> screen when the installation program comes up. And the only way FreeBSD
> is going to get a graphical anything is by using Xorg, and FreeBSD does
> not maintain that distribution - so we are now dependent on the Xorg
> group writing their code with no bugs for our installation program to work.
>
While I admit that sysinstall could be polished at the rough edges, I vote for a non-graphical installer for server aimed installations. I see no practical reason to have an X based installer for a server installation at all, with all the heavy stuff that's necessary for it. Please leave that to the desktop oriented BSD distributions. I wonder how many server admins would like to see an X based installer.
I rather would propose a clear distinction (communicated to new users) between desktop aimed distributions and server based ones, where the first category would be the current distribution of FreeBSD, with a nice graphical installer, a window manager, drivers for most sound, usb, wireless and video devices, and desktop applications added to it. I am not familiar with desktopBSD and Freesbie, but I can imagine that these are already working in that direction. (I am using FreeBSD-current as a desktop OS on a laptop, but it required some days of tweaking to get sound, touchpad & usb mouse, 1280x800 resolution and wireless networking running.)
Niek
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