Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 435142
direct installation option
Last modified: 2013-03-13 01:43:05 EDT
Description of problem: We need a boot loader option to directly perform a installation to hard disk without booting as a livecd Additional info: This was discussed on list before but hasn't been implemented yet afaik.
.... Why? *HOW*? You'd still need to boot the livecd to run the installer.
Why? - This was already explained by me in the live cd list. Sometimes I know I need to do a installation and I don't need to wait for the live cd to boot up and I only have the live cd image available How? idk. Jeremy said he was looking into implementing that. Maybe directly call the installer or something.
Presumably the boot option would enter a run level that brings up a very simple session that starts the installer. From a usability point of view it kinda makes sense. Except for the fact that the whole language/keyboard/a11y etc. selection would go missing. And don't even try to ask for this in the bootloader; it's been extensively discussed earlier and it's not going to happen. So this is most likely WONTFIX.
Even 'directly call the installer' means you boot the livecd, to run X, the installer, etc. So you don't really gain anything.
From a end user perspective, they gain a direct straight forward method to do this and it is likely to be more efficient since you don't have to wait for the DE to show up on a live cd. This is significantly faster especially if you do it on a relatively low resource system. Anyway since Jeremy Katz already said he is looking into implementing this, this is mostly just a reminder. Take it or leave it.
Add 'liveinst' (or 'textinst') to your bootloader paramters; the livecd initscript will then launch anaconda instead of continuing with a normal boot.
This is just crap. Jeremy, how are you handling language/keyboard/a11y?
(In reply to comment #7) > This is just crap. Jeremy, how are you handling language/keyboard/a11y? Language and keyboard get prompted for like they do in the normal case. If you want a11y, don't do this. Yes, it sucks in all kinds of ways. But it's not like we're exposing it as "this is the best way to go about doing this", instead it's a "for a small subset of users that have crazy needs, yes, we can let you do what you want".
As long as the option is not exposed in the UI it might be less bad. Though, supporting more than one path is always interesting...
Created attachment 297348 [details] loader patch
Darn, my comments got wiped out.... This is rough proof of concept that uses the livecd in place of stage2. pass livefs at the boot prompt, anaconda looks for a livecd instead of stage2. liveinit is for a future "rebootless install", mount the new system at /sysroot after the install and gets switch-rooted to a running system. If there is interest, I'll port this to the current svn and continue. If not, well it is just a pet project for me then.