Re: new sysinstall

[Garance A Drosihn <drosih@xxxxxxx>]

At 7:25 PM +0000 9/2/03, Tobias Weingartner wrote:
> Matthew Dillon wrote:
> >      Summary so far of "How to rewrite sysinstall".
>  >     * Make CDRom #1 a fully live image, allowing the system
>  >       to boot into a complete environment.  ...
>
> This is a good thing...
>
>  >     * Split a normal installation into two stages.
>  >       Stage 1 is responsible for [...] and reboots.
>  >       Stage 2 is responsible for [...]
>
> I like this idea.  Especially the automated one... but if it
> requires a reboot after stage 1, it defeats the purpose...  As
> then I have to go fiddle with the bios 3 times for each machine
> in order to get a lab full of computers up.
>
> 1) Enable CD-ROM & CD-ROM boot
> 2) Boot CD-ROM
> 3) Disable CD-ROM boot
> 4) Boot disk/install
> 5) Disable CD-ROM

Note that list is what you may have to do.  My list is considerably
different, due to our hardware and our requirements.  I think it's
a bit of an exaggeration to claim that extra reboot will defeat the
purpose of everything else.  And even with your list, I don't see
why you do step 3 as step 3, instead of just waiting until step 5
to disable both things.  Probably your hardware is just different
than the hardware I'm used to.  If you're doing a lab, I suspect
you'd want to set up some server to handle all the stage 2
processing, so you could remove the CD after step #2 in your list.

In any case, I strongly hope that:
  1) dragonfly would also support some sort of net install,
     which avoids most of this issue.
  2) if you do boot up off the dragonfly CD, you will first
     see a prompt which allows you to switch the booting
     process from the CD to the just-installed hard disk.
     Me, I'd rather boot up directly from the hard disk just
     to make sure step #1 went OK, but if someone did boot
     up off the CD then they could still switch to the hard
     disk without having to reboot yet-again.

--
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad@xxxxxxxxxxx
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih@xxxxxxx