Re: switching frontend on the fly

[stappers@stappers.nl (Geert Stappers)]

Op 25-11-2006 om 14:39 schreef Attilio Fiandrotti:
> Geert Stappers wrote:
> >Op 25-11-2006 om 11:31 schreef Jérôme Marant:
> >>>
> >>
> >>I didn't know that you could change the frontend on the fly.
> >>So you interrupted it right after installing the libc and
> >>restarted after changing the frontend?
> >
> >I'm also curious about how to switch the frontend.
> >
> >My use case for it is running d-i on a slow (e.g. old) computer
> >which default starts with newt frontend and switching to text frontend
> >would allow the CPU to spend it's power on d-i rather then
> >redrawing/updating the screen.
> 
> While debugging the g-i i often used tricks like this, but i'm not 100% 
> sure killing the installer while a d-i component runs is a safe practice.
> I noticed that killing the partitioner causes the system to hang, while 
> other components (e.g. network configurator etc..) can be killed and 
> then restarted later without noticeable issues.
> Geert, maybe it's safer passing something like DEBIAN_FRONTEND=text to 
> the kernel while preseeding ?
> Honestly i dunno if using thetxt frontend instead of newt will save a 
> lot of memory, but for sure using newt instead of gtk will save a lot of 
> space in initrd and memory at runtime.
> If you need to do remote installations you could use the web frontend i 
> wrote, which should offer a low cpu/memory/space overhead.

Can the web frontend be activated on the fly?


Cheers
Geert Stappers