Re: d-i oldworld mac: floppies fail on 4400/200 and 7200/75
On Fri, 2004-04-09 at 16:02, Frans Pop wrote:
>
> On Friday 09 April 2004 21:49, Rick Thomas wrote:
> > This is OldWorld PowerMac.
> >
> > Booting off of floppy uses the miboot bootloader. It's not like lilo or
> > grub on i386. There's no point in the process where you get to enter
> > that kind of stuff.
> >
> That means you'd probably like one of the first questions the installer asks
> to be "At which level would you like to install: normal, medium, expert".
> Or something like that.
> (There have been several discussions on the list about the best naming of the
> different levels.)
>
> Personally I wouldn't mind a question like that for i386, but it looks like it
> is necessary for your platform.
Yes. I'd say that something like that is necessary for full
functionality on OldWorld Macs.
Actually, I'd go much farther than that. Here's part of my wish-list
for my dream installer someday:
I'd like to be able -- easily, simply, and transparently -- to navigate
up and down the detail hierarchy at will.
For example, here's one possible way to do what I'd like. There are a
whole universe of other ways, many probably much better than this one.
This is just the first one that came to my mind.
At any point in the process, the user should be able to hit "escape" (or
some other key -- "escape" just has the advantage that it's mnemonic for
"stepping out of line") and immediately switch to the next more detailed
level of configuration questions. Some other key (maybe "alt-escape"?)
should do the opposite -- shift to the next less detailed level.
It may be necessary to insert additional check-points in the lowest
detail (most fully automatic) level of the process to allow the user to
"escape" at those points if they need to. This extra interactivity
would slow down the default installation process -- a possible
drawback. Maybe this could be made less of a problem by allowing a sort
of "zero detail"/"batch mode" install, where all the configuration
questions are answered in advance of the installation by filling out a
configuration file.
It may be desirable to have a more fine-grained hierarchy of levels of
detail than the current three "normal"/"medium"/"expert".
Carrying this principle to it's logical extreme, it should be possible
(and easy) for the user to navigate *any and all* hierarchies in the
d-i. Examples of the kind of hierarchies I'm referring to are:
(*) the above mentioned "automatic" vs "user-specified" configuration
spectrum.
(*) the spectrum between "novice who needs chatty explanations" vs
"expert who is thoroughly familiar with the installer, and just wants to
get the job done as fast as possible"
(*) the spectrum between "bare-bones minimal" vs "fully-featured"
application package-sets.
etc...
As I said, it's all wish-list stuff.
Enjoy!
Rick
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