prevent anaconda start

Thu May 24 18:29:23 UTC 2012

On 2012/05/24 09:24 (GMT-0700) Adam Williamson composed:

> On Thu, 2012-05-24 at 00:40 -0400, Felix Miata wrote:

>>  On 2012/05/23 18:45 (GMT-0700) Adam Williamson composed:

>>  >  On Wed, 2012-05-23 at 20:48 -0400, Felix Miata wrote:

>>  >>   Intel 865 gfxchip.

>>  >>   No idea whether this result is intentional or not, but I put a 3 on end of
>>  >>   Grub cmdline to start an HTTP installation of F17 from a mirror. After the
>>  >>   installation system downloaded, I got login prompts on most ttys, and no
>>  >>   Anaconda anywhere, text or GUI.

>>  >  Well, that seems rather expected. If you want a text mode install, use
>>  >  the option on the boot menu or pass parameter 'text'.

>>  I wasn't looking for a text mode install. The "3" was just a habit from
>>  normal booting. For openSUSE and Mandriva/Mageia installation (and IIRC
>>  *buntu's and maybe even Debian's), including it will cause their installation
>>  programs to also include the 3 in the Grub menu stanzas, but have no effect
>>  on the installation process itself. Having it totally prevent any kind of
>>  installation initialization having booted an installation kernel and initrd
>>  to me is completely unexpected.

> Well, 3 gets interpreted by systemd as 'boot to runlevel 3 equivalent',
> so you get a text mode boot. But nothing told anaconda to start up in
> text mode. So you just get...not much. You can't really assume that how
> it behaves on another distro is how it'll behave on Fedora, unless it's
> written down somewhere, and I don't recall ever seeing that. It's a bit
> of a 'doctor it hurts', I think...

I think too. I just looked through over a dozen Grub menus containing Rawhide 
installation stanzas, and found none containing a 3 on a Rawhide kernel line, 
so likely I've never before tried it with Fedora.

Nevertheless, some people who ever use X don't habitually use runlevel 3 to 
get there, and I think it may be a shortcoming that an installation kernel 
and initrd may care in the usual sense about runlevels or would fail to 
initialize their primary purpose for existence just because a runlevel 5 
state had not been reached. Maybe it's purposeful, maybe not. I brought it up 
here instead of Bugzilla purely to try to flesh out whether it may be good, 
bad, or don't care.

IMO, an installation set should start the installation process in any event 
in which something specifically designed to thwart it has not been 
interposed. I don't think a 3 on cmdline should qualify as such. A standalone 
3 could easily be an inadvertent result of a mistyped and unnoticed 
192.168.0.133 or 192.168.1.13.
-- 
"The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant
words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)

  Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/