On Oct 31, 2005, at 10:04 PM, Joey Hess wrote:
----- Forwarded message from "Google Blog Search: debian-installer" <r2e@kitenet.net> -----From: "Google Blog Search: debian-installer" <r2e@kitenet.net> Date: Tue, 01 Nov 2005 01:15:35 -0000 To: joey@kitenet.net Subject: Debian text based installer getting the boot User-Agent: rss2email The Debian Weekly News for October 25th, 2005 discusses the upcoming graphical frontend to the **debian****-****installer** as part of the most recent minutes of the monthly **Debian** **Installer** team meeting. It appears that after all of these years **...** URL: http://osdir.com/Article7765.phtml
I hope that the article is just not very accurate, in that it has always been my impression that the graphical installer is merely another front end to d-i and that the traditional installation methods will continue to be supported. Am I wrong? As someone who is pretty involved with the S/390 (and eventually, I hope, zSeries) port, I'll be quite concerned if there's not a text-based installer available, given that the "console" on these machines is purely textual[0].
Adam[0] This is not QUITE true: the later 3270s had programmable character sets, and I remember that at Rice in the early 90s Rick Troth had written a GIF viewer for 3279 tubes, which was really impressive in a pixellated 16-color sort of way. But for all intents and purposes, you have a dumb text terminal. The 3215 is purely a glass tty; although the 3270 is smarter, it's also EBCDIC and line- oriented (you only generate an interrupt to the host when ending a line and pressing Enter, or pressing one of the Attention keys or Function keys), and so the installers don't use it because it absolutely does not conform to a cbreak model. So for that system at least, it's necessary to have a dumb text-mode installer at least long enough to get ssh up.