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Unlike in previous versions of RHEL, there appears to be no "text install" option offered in the boot menu of RHEL6 beta. However, if "tab" is used to change boot parameters and "askmethod" is replaced by "text", text mode installer does in fact work. Since a lot of servers don't have a mouse for a graphical install, and/or might be being installed via a serial only text console, this important installation method option should be clearly offered, especially since it is already built in.
text mode install is deprecated, and not fully featured; therefore it's not offered as a first-level option. Using something like VNC is greatly preferred.
In that case there needs to be an alternative way to break out to the command line to run fdisk and mkfs manually. This is pretty much impossible in cases such as installing in a VM using virt-manager. Even if there is a shell running on tty 2, there is no way to access it from the graphical install via virt-manager, since pressing Ctrl-Alt-F2 switches to the HOST's VT 2. Having full manual control over this part of the install process is vital, especially for making sure partitions are aligned properly on SSDs and other media sensitive to it (e.g. disks with non-standard hardware sector sizes), along with any special mkfs options that need to be applied (e.g. mkfs.ext2/3/4 -b 4096 -E stripe-width=32 for SSDs with erase block size of 128KB).
(In reply to comment #2) > In that case there needs to be an alternative way to break out to the command > line to run fdisk and mkfs manually. This is pretty much impossible in cases > such as installing in a VM using virt-manager. Even if there is a shell running > on tty 2, there is no way to access it from the graphical install via > virt-manager, since pressing Ctrl-Alt-F2 switches to the HOST's VT 2. virt-manager's Send Key menu offers the ability to send Ctrl-Alt-Fx to the virt machine rather than the host system. > Having full manual control over this part of the install process is vital, > especially for making sure partitions are aligned properly on SSDs and other > media sensitive to it (e.g. disks with non-standard hardware sector sizes), > along with any special mkfs options that need to be applied (e.g. mkfs.ext2/3/4 > -b 4096 -E stripe-width=32 for SSDs with erase block size of 128KB). For complex setups like this, kickstart is your best bet. Once you figure out the commands you need to run for a particular installation doing an interactive install, construct a kickstart file and perform the partitioning and formatting in the kickstart's %pre script. Then use the kickstart "part" commands to assign the newly created partitions to different mount points, making sure to pass the --noformat option.