0.94 first impressions
Craig Ringer
craig at postnewspapers.com.au
Sat Sep 27 04:45:59 UTC 2003
> I vote that the installer PnP all the hardware. Full stop. Why would you
> not want to do that?????
The installer may well do the hardware detection. The idea, however, is
that the majority of the install process will happen after the machine
has rebooted and started up off the hard disk. This way, less time is
wasted testing with dodgy hardware, you have more control during
install, and the actual on-CD installer can be much smaller, simpler,
and easier to maintain.
Think of it this way: the CD's job is to make the machine bootable, but
not much more. Partitioning, os core copy, etc. After reboot, the
"install" continues when more packages are fetched off CD (or other
mechanisms), more auto-detection is done, etc. There's much less
duplication of effort to use (say) a cdrw-config tool for initial setup
too, instead of having to essentially duplicate it's job in the installer.
It would not be at all difficult to have the hardware auto-detect happen
quite transparently, just as if it were off the CD - just do it during
firstboot. You could always re-run the same detection later, too, as a
nice bonus.
I think the idea is really to simplify the "install" and move much of
what's done in the relatively clumsy and hard to maintain install
environment to firstboot, where it can share tools the rest of the OS
uses, has a more complete environment available, etc.
Craig Ringer
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