Date: Tue, 2 Jan 1996 14:31:02 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: obrien@cs.ucdavis.edu (David E. O'Brien) Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: syscons driver Message-ID: <199601022131.OAA12637@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <9601022034.AA09963@toadflax.cs.ucdavis.edu> from "David E. O'Brien" at Jan 2, 96 12:34:38 pm
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> Maybe, but personally, I don't want to spend my net connection bringing > over the X server and bloated sysinstall. The most often compaired OS > installs are MS-NT and OS/2. MS-NT has _3_ 1.44meg floppies of drivers > and boot strapping you have to go through just to be able to talk to the > hard disk and CDROM drive. It is from the CDROM that it loads all the > "pretty" GUI's. OS/2 has 2 1.44meg disks and doesn't support near as > many hardware varitities. > > IMHO, these bloated install programs are only practicle if you know the > user is installing from CDROM media. First, a minor correction: those floppies are DMF: they are larger than 1.44M by more than a little bit. Second, a general UI API that makes no distinction between text and graphics on the call end does not *require* X to get a GUI. If you don't want to use a GUI, pick the TUI instead when you are presented the option. Finally, I just (last week: yes, on my vacation) installed Win95 from floppies on several machines (it was one of those "Relative asks" type of things) and it came up graphically. In fact, to use the upgrade option, you have to be running Windows first. So a GUI is assumed. Finally, many many products use the "install shield" toolkit (even MSVC), a third party product that provides enough of a Windows API for a nominally text system to do a graphical install. Don't get me wrong: I find the text only install for remote, small, and headless hardware to be a good idea. But CGA and EGA and MGA hardware is *not* "incapable of running X" and we shouldn't be pretending that it is, then using that as the rationale for not allowing GUI installs as an option. I know that once I'm in an environment, I don't want to leave; the biggest problem is usability of the system administration tools (such as they aren't -- negation intentional) for both the initial install and subsequent administrative tasks. And *both* should take place in the environment the user will be running in, and that's most likely going to be X (if it isn't for you, then good for you: you can use the TUI version of the shared library with the same API. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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