On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 1:02 AM, Yasha Karant <[email protected]> wrote: > I have just (successfully) upgraded my workstation from SL 6x to SL 7x . > Several observations: > > I manually configured both the network and the hard drive resources. Before > the actual installation started, there was a warning that I had not set > either the root password or a user account. I tried to address these before > the actual installation started, after choosing the partitions for > installation of the SL 7 required applications/directories, but the > installer froze with a request to send an error message to the upstream > vendor -- and the sending did not work. Upon rebooting and restarting the > install, I found that the partitions/disks had been changed, but no packages > installed (I had to configure the network information, etc., again). This > time I let the installer install all of the packages, and then assign the > root password, user account, etc.
The new installer selected by upstream is *not* good. The spoke and wheel model is pretty silly, because it's all simply mapped into an ordinary flow chart model executed by anaconda under the hood. Remapping a flow chart program to an entirely new mental model of the process to which it bears no actual programming resemblance, just to present a different GUI, was a very, very silly choice. Combined with its layout being inconsistent and confusing, and it violates every single one of Eric Raymond's guidelines for open source interfaces at "his old essay "The Luxury of Ignorance", at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html. This includes the extra guidelines I sent him and which he added later as a postscript at the bottom. It's prettier, but succumbs to the Gnome and systemd model of "pull everything into a pretty tool" rather than segregating and executing simple steps well with limited, but very effective, tools. > There are a limited number of default configurations. However, there seems > to be no way to choose the specific packages to install. Is the assumption > that these will be done post-install? > > Yasha Karant As I remember when I did this 2 months ago, it was a pain to find. (See my notes above about the silly graphical interface.) . These days, post-install or kickstart is safer. It can also be much faster to set up a kickstart file, or a set of them, that you can put under source control and have well defined initial configurations. If you've the inclination and the resources, you can even set up PXE and have a "re-install from scratch" or "start me with a rescue image" option. Just don't set them as defaults unless you want to scrub and replae the OS every time you boot.
