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Date:      Mon, 01 Jan 1996 20:17:09 -0800
From:      "Amancio Hasty Jr." <hasty@rah.star-gate.com>
To:        Warner Losh <imp@village.org>
Cc:        hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: X for install (was: Re: syscons driver) 
Message-ID:  <199601020417.UAA02207@rah.star-gate.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 01 Jan 1996 20:55:59 MST." <199601020356.UAA23636@rover.village.org> 

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I think that an X installation be that being X oriented or firing up 
an X server will only happen till someone around
here really gets upset with the current curses implementation and
the lame excuse of that it does not fit in a boot floppy.

If we have a cdrom and the booted kernel can access it then by all 
means lets use it !!!

In my case, I am willing to tolerate the system installation cause
I don't do it that often.

	Amancio

>>> Warner Losh said:
 > : [27]Come on guys, why is it that you dont get it that there are LOADS of
 > : [27]users out there that either don't have the HW or simply dont want to
 > : [27]run X for various reasons (I'm not one of them I use X :) :) )
 > : 
 > : I agree.  If the installation requires X, you can also kiss goodbye to
 > : all those people with 5Meg and 4Meg systems who are able to install now.
 > : They'll just pop over to Linux or SCO or whatever that doesn't have
 > : those memory requirements, and will come up in the simple hardware
 > : they have. 
 > 
 > Maybe I'm getting into this a couple of days late...
 > 
 > However, I'd kill to have a nice install/upgrade procedure that I can
 > run from X.  This is "can run from X" rather than "must run with X".
 > I'd rather see fewer screens to go through to get the stuff installed,
 > and just click on what I want.  The curses interface is nice, but I
 > also want the ability to have something look at /cdrom/packages/*.tgz
 > and give me a nicer way to install them than pkg_add (which is nice,
 > but still involves more typing than just a couple of clicks here or
 > there).
 > 
 > Maybe I'm too close to the X world, but it would be nice.  It would be
 > equally nice if I had enough spare time to commit to this project that
 > it would happen.  I have some kludgy beginings in OI that I had to
 > abadon when I left the seller of OI's employment (I had hoped to ship
 > out a monsterly huge static binary that would show proof of concept).
 > 
 > Anyway, if it is still bugging me after I get some hardware I have an
 > OS (it is a strange MIPS box), and after my current "side" contract
 > expires, I may try to work up something with Perl/Tk to show people
 > what I'm talking about.
 > 
 > I also agree this is made a low priority by the huge disk space
 > requirements that aren't there on a boot floopy (but could be there on
 > a CDROM or something like that).  It is further made a low priority by
 > the "raising of the bar" for the memory starved systems out there (8M
 > would unlikely be enough given that we don't have swap until "late" in
 > the install process).  Finally, the difficulty most people would face
 > in bringing up X would likely make it unsuitable (but doing the
 > install at VGA resolutions like MS does with Windows might not make it
 > too horrible).
 > 
 > Warner
 > 




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