Hi,
I would love to see F19 make a good first impression. The first time you see something Fedora-related on the screen currently is the graphical grub screen, followed by the filling-in-Fedora of Plymouth, followed by the gdm login screen. Grub in particular is problematic, with a starfield background that looks like a Fedora background from a few releases ago and a progress bar that indicates the progress in 'booting the bootloader'.
There are also some issues on the login screen, with Fedora logo being at small-print size right now.
I think a few simple changes we can make a big improvement to the visual experience for F19:
- Turn off the graphical grub screen
Even if we are not able to suppress the boot menu entirely, or having a clean boot menu like this: https://raw.github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/system-lock-lo..., avoiding the graphical screen will be a win in terms of reduced visual noise.
- Switch to a simple spinner for the plymouth theme
This theme is available in plymouth today: https://raw.github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/system-lock-lo... I know when we've proposed this in the past, there was concern about loosing the one place where the Fedora logo is visible in the boot. I'd like to propose a compromise that will keep the Fedora logo _and_ improve the transition to the login screen: How about we use the spinner as in that mockup, but add a reasonably-sized Fedora logo in the top left corner.
- Replace the small print logo on the login screen with a bigger one
The idea here is to replace the small-print Fedora text logo that we currently have in that corner by the same Fedora logo thats used in plymouth, so that it remains unchanged as we transition from plymouth to gdm.
What do you think ?
Matthias
Hey,
just point out that at least here it takes really a lot of time since gdm appears to actually you can use the computer. Any chance to get this improved as well?
On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 5:58 PM, Matthias Clasen mclasen@redhat.com wrote:
Hi,
I would love to see F19 make a good first impression. The first time you see something Fedora-related on the screen currently is the graphical grub screen, followed by the filling-in-Fedora of Plymouth, followed by the gdm login screen. Grub in particular is problematic, with a starfield background that looks like a Fedora background from a few releases ago and a progress bar that indicates the progress in 'booting the bootloader'.
There are also some issues on the login screen, with Fedora logo being at small-print size right now.
I think a few simple changes we can make a big improvement to the visual experience for F19:
- Turn off the graphical grub screen
Even if we are not able to suppress the boot menu entirely, or having a clean boot menu like this: https://raw.github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/system-lock-lo..., avoiding the graphical screen will be a win in terms of reduced visual noise.
- Switch to a simple spinner for the plymouth theme
This theme is available in plymouth today: https://raw.github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/system-lock-lo... I know when we've proposed this in the past, there was concern about loosing the one place where the Fedora logo is visible in the boot. I'd like to propose a compromise that will keep the Fedora logo _and_ improve the transition to the login screen: How about we use the spinner as in that mockup, but add a reasonably-sized Fedora logo in the top left corner.
- Replace the small print logo on the login screen with a bigger one
The idea here is to replace the small-print Fedora text logo that we currently have in that corner by the same Fedora logo thats used in plymouth, so that it remains unchanged as we transition from plymouth to gdm.
What do you think ?
Matthias
-- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
Hey,
just point out that at least here it takes really a lot of time since gdm appears to actually you can use the computer. Any chance to get this improved as well?
On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 5:58 PM, Matthias Clasen mclasen@redhat.com wrote:
Hi,
I would love to see F19 make a good first impression. The first time you see something Fedora-related on the screen currently is the graphical grub screen, followed by the filling-in-Fedora of Plymouth, followed by the gdm login screen. Grub in particular is problematic, with a starfield background that looks like a Fedora background from a few releases ago and a progress bar that indicates the progress in 'booting the bootloader'.
There are also some issues on the login screen, with Fedora logo being at small-print size right now.
I think a few simple changes we can make a big improvement to the visual experience for F19:
- Turn off the graphical grub screen
Even if we are not able to suppress the boot menu entirely, or having a clean boot menu like this: https://raw.github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/system-lock-lo..., avoiding the graphical screen will be a win in terms of reduced visual noise.
- Switch to a simple spinner for the plymouth theme
This theme is available in plymouth today: https://raw.github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/system-lock-lo... I know when we've proposed this in the past, there was concern about loosing the one place where the Fedora logo is visible in the boot. I'd like to propose a compromise that will keep the Fedora logo _and_ improve the transition to the login screen: How about we use the spinner as in that mockup, but add a reasonably-sized Fedora logo in the top left corner.
- Replace the small print logo on the login screen with a bigger one
The idea here is to replace the small-print Fedora text logo that we currently have in that corner by the same Fedora logo thats used in plymouth, so that it remains unchanged as we transition from plymouth to gdm.
What do you think ?
Matthias
-- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 6:58 PM, Matthias Clasen mclasen@redhat.com wrote:
Hi,
I would love to see F19 make a good first impression. The first time you see something Fedora-related on the screen currently is the graphical grub screen, followed by the filling-in-Fedora of Plymouth, followed by the gdm login screen. Grub in particular is problematic, with a starfield background that looks like a Fedora background from a few releases ago and a progress bar that indicates the progress in 'booting the bootloader'.
There are also some issues on the login screen, with Fedora logo being at small-print size right now.
I think a few simple changes we can make a big improvement to the visual experience for F19:
- Turn off the graphical grub screen
Even if we are not able to suppress the boot menu entirely, or having a clean boot menu like this: https://raw.github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/system-lock-lo..., avoiding the graphical screen will be a win in terms of reduced visual noise.
- Switch to a simple spinner for the plymouth theme
This theme is available in plymouth today: https://raw.github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/system-lock-lo... I know when we've proposed this in the past, there was concern about loosing the one place where the Fedora logo is visible in the boot. I'd like to propose a compromise that will keep the Fedora logo _and_ improve the transition to the login screen: How about we use the spinner as in that mockup, but add a reasonably-sized Fedora logo in the top left corner.
- Replace the small print logo on the login screen with a bigger one
The idea here is to replace the small-print Fedora text logo that we currently have in that corner by the same Fedora logo thats used in plymouth, so that it remains unchanged as we transition from plymouth to gdm.
What do you think ?
Matthias
-- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
This pretty much sums up all reasonable suggestions from the last cycle (and adds few great ones), and I completely agree with all of them.
so ffiw, I'm completely in favour of this change.
Unfortunately, the clean bootloader mockup will be impossible to achieve without convincing the Fedora kernel folks it's a good idea.
When Mo reworked the boot menu she wanted to have "Fedora" and "Advanced options for Fedora" listing all the older kernels. It worked, but the kernel package didn't use grub2-config and used grubby instead so newly installed kernels are still added to the main menu. After a discussion in -devel, the kernel folks listed many technical problems with using grub2-config (in short: it sucks), and one other argument (that I strictly disagree with) was that the Fedora userbase is made of users who want to easily switch kernels for debugging needs and the submenu makes it harder on them. Although the latter argument is a complete pile of nonsense, the technical problems with grub2-config still stand, and your mockup doesn't include the ability to boot older kernels (this is unfortunately needed because, well, we suck. Sometimes kernel updates screws things up and we don't want to leave the user with a non-booting machine. If any of you can think of a more elegant solution for this problem, I'd be curious to hear it).
I'm not sure if we can fix the grub2-config problems... it is flawed by design. But perhaps this type of menu will be possible once we drop grub and start using another bootloader, ie. Gummiboot.
On 11 March 2013 17:16, Elad Alfassa elad@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 6:58 PM, Matthias Clasen mclasen@redhat.com wrote:
Hi,
I would love to see F19 make a good first impression. The first time you see something Fedora-related on the screen currently is the graphical grub screen, followed by the filling-in-Fedora of Plymouth, followed by the gdm login screen. Grub in particular is problematic, with a starfield background that looks like a Fedora background from a few releases ago and a progress bar that indicates the progress in 'booting the bootloader'.
There are also some issues on the login screen, with Fedora logo being at small-print size right now.
I think a few simple changes we can make a big improvement to the visual experience for F19:
- Turn off the graphical grub screen
Even if we are not able to suppress the boot menu entirely, or having a clean boot menu like this: https://raw.github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/system-lock-lo..., avoiding the graphical screen will be a win in terms of reduced visual noise.
- Switch to a simple spinner for the plymouth theme
This theme is available in plymouth today: https://raw.github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/system-lock-lo... I know when we've proposed this in the past, there was concern about loosing the one place where the Fedora logo is visible in the boot. I'd like to propose a compromise that will keep the Fedora logo _and_ improve the transition to the login screen: How about we use the spinner as in that mockup, but add a reasonably-sized Fedora logo in the top left corner.
- Replace the small print logo on the login screen with a bigger one
The idea here is to replace the small-print Fedora text logo that we currently have in that corner by the same Fedora logo thats used in plymouth, so that it remains unchanged as we transition from plymouth to gdm.
What do you think ?
Matthias
-- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
This pretty much sums up all reasonable suggestions from the last cycle (and adds few great ones), and I completely agree with all of them.
so ffiw, I'm completely in favour of this change.
Unfortunately, the clean bootloader mockup will be impossible to achieve without convincing the Fedora kernel folks it's a good idea.
When Mo reworked the boot menu she wanted to have "Fedora" and "Advanced options for Fedora" listing all the older kernels. It worked, but the kernel package didn't use grub2-config and used grubby instead so newly installed kernels are still added to the main menu. After a discussion in -devel, the kernel folks listed many technical problems with using grub2-config (in short: it sucks), and one other argument (that I strictly disagree with) was that the Fedora userbase is made of users who want to easily switch kernels for debugging needs and the submenu makes it harder on them. Although the latter argument is a complete pile of nonsense, the technical problems with grub2-config still stand, and your mockup doesn't include the ability to boot older kernels (this is unfortunately needed because, well, we suck. Sometimes kernel updates screws things up and we don't want to leave the user with a non-booting machine. If any of you can think of a more elegant solution for this problem, I'd be curious to hear it).
I'm not sure if we can fix the grub2-config problems... it is flawed by design. But perhaps this type of menu will be possible once we drop grub and start using another bootloader, ie. Gummiboot.
-- -Elad Alfassa.
I'd also like to see the brltty daemon started too. Debian have been doing this for ages, so if you are using a Braille display, you can install your own machine without help. This is not the case with Fedora.
Z.
On 03/11/2013 12:58 PM, Matthias Clasen wrote:
- Turn off the graphical grub screen
I don't know why - I think grub2 is just a PITA to work with compared to grub - but the intention here was that it should be turned off by default in final releases, and on in alpha/beta releases. I think we forgot to turn it off on F18 for some reason.
~m
On 03/11/2013 12:58 PM, Matthias Clasen wrote:
Hi,
I would love to see F19 make a good first impression. The first time you see something Fedora-related on the screen currently is the graphical grub screen, followed by the filling-in-Fedora of Plymouth, followed by the gdm login screen. Grub in particular is problematic, with a starfield background that looks like a Fedora background from a few releases ago and a progress bar that indicates the progress in 'booting the bootloader'.
There are also some issues on the login screen, with Fedora logo being at small-print size right now.
I think a few simple changes we can make a big improvement to the visual experience for F19:
- Turn off the graphical grub screen
Even if we are not able to suppress the boot menu entirely, or having a clean boot menu like this: https://raw.github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/system-lock-lo..., avoiding the graphical screen will be a win in terms of reduced visual noise.
IIRC, in f17, the GRUB screen was not visible. (you could still press f11 to bring it up if you needed it to). Does anyone know why this behaviour changed?
- Switch to a simple spinner for the plymouth theme
This theme is available in plymouth today: https://raw.github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/system-lock-lo... I know when we've proposed this in the past, there was concern about loosing the one place where the Fedora logo is visible in the boot. I'd like to propose a compromise that will keep the Fedora logo _and_ improve the transition to the login screen: How about we use the spinner as in that mockup, but add a reasonably-sized Fedora logo in the top left corner.
The current logo also currently behaves as a progress bar (the logo fills up). I know that currently it really doesn't match to any kind of progress, but is the idea here that there will be no progress indicator, just a spinner?
Also, is there an intention here to explain to the user (e.g. text or icons) what is happening? In F18, the fedora logo progress bar in plymouth is the same for both bootup and when applying updates.
cheers ryanlerch
- Replace the small print logo on the login screen with a bigger one
The idea here is to replace the small-print Fedora text logo that we currently have in that corner by the same Fedora logo thats used in plymouth, so that it remains unchanged as we transition from plymouth to gdm.
What do you think ?
Matthias
On Mon, 11.03.13 12:58, Matthias Clasen (mclasen@redhat.com) wrote:
Hi,
I would love to see F19 make a good first impression. The first time you see something Fedora-related on the screen currently is the graphical grub screen, followed by the filling-in-Fedora of Plymouth, followed by the gdm login screen. Grub in particular is problematic, with a starfield background that looks like a Fedora background from a few releases ago and a progress bar that indicates the progress in 'booting the bootloader'.
There are also some issues on the login screen, with Fedora logo being at small-print size right now.
I think a few simple changes we can make a big improvement to the visual experience for F19:
- Turn off the graphical grub screen
Even if we are not able to suppress the boot menu entirely, or having a clean boot menu like this: https://raw.github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/system-lock-lo..., avoiding the graphical screen will be a win in terms of reduced visual noise.
We should not only turn off the graphical screen, but the entire thing should get turned off unless the user presses some key.
This is probably relatively easy to do, we'd just need remove a lot of module loading lines from the generated grub.conf.
- Switch to a simple spinner for the plymouth theme
This theme is available in plymouth today: https://raw.github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/system-lock-lo... I know when we've proposed this in the past, there was concern about loosing the one place where the Fedora logo is visible in the boot. I'd like to propose a compromise that will keep the Fedora logo _and_ improve the transition to the login screen: How about we use the spinner as in that mockup, but add a reasonably-sized Fedora logo in the top left corner.
If it was for me I'd remove all of this entirely, and we should get Plymouth to suppress any kind of fancy output until 10s or so into the boot (heck, since ply saves performance data from the previous boot it could even take that into account regarding whether we should show anything at all).
Lennart
On 03/11/2013 04:58 PM, Matthias Clasen wrote:
Hi,
I would love to see F19 make a good first impression. The first time you see something Fedora-related on the screen currently is the graphical grub screen, followed by the filling-in-Fedora of Plymouth, followed by the gdm login screen. Grub in particular is problematic, with a starfield background that looks like a Fedora background from a few releases ago and a progress bar that indicates the progress in 'booting the bootloader'.
There are also some issues on the login screen, with Fedora logo being at small-print size right now.
I think a few simple changes we can make a big improvement to the visual experience for F19:
- Turn off the graphical grub screen
Yeah and hopefully those brief grub2 error msg we always seem to have would be silence with it.
Even if we are not able to suppress the boot menu entirely, or having a clean boot menu like this: https://raw.github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/system-lock-lo..., avoiding the graphical screen will be a win in terms of reduced visual noise.
- Switch to a simple spinner for the plymouth theme
Or spins fade into their DM instead of a spinner which probably is cleaner/nicer.
This theme is available in plymouth today: https://raw.github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/system-lock-lo... I know when we've proposed this in the past, there was concern about loosing the one place where the Fedora logo is visible in the boot. I'd like to propose a compromise that will keep the Fedora logo _and_ improve the transition to the login screen: How about we use the spinner as in that mockup, but add a reasonably-sized Fedora logo in the top left corner.
- Replace the small print logo on the login screen with a bigger one
The idea here is to replace the small-print Fedora text logo that we currently have in that corner by the same Fedora logo thats used in plymouth, so that it remains unchanged as we transition from plymouth to gdm.
What do you think ?
Should we not be focusing booting without initramfs and unnecessary services ( preferably all non socked activated services ) first along with replacing grub2 with something usable, then the *DE spins can paint it however they see fit ( Fedora colors upstream colors and fade into dm's and what not )?
JBG
On 11/03/13 09:58 AM, Matthias Clasen wrote:
- Turn off the graphical grub screen
Even if we are not able to suppress the boot menu entirely, or having a clean boot menu like this: https://raw.github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/system-lock-lo..., avoiding the graphical screen will be a win in terms of reduced visual noise.
The intended design here is that grub has a 0 timeout if installed in a single boot configuration, and a 5 second timeout if installed in a multiboot configuration.
Since the switch to grub2, it has in fact had a 5 second timeout in each case. This is basically a bug and really should just be fixed as such - except as mjg59's note that some systems now apparently make it hard to bring up the menu in the 0 timeout case dictates.
The "progress bar that indicates the progress in 'booting the bootloader'" does not indicate 'progress in booting the bootloader', it's just a graphical representation of the timeout. It counts down 5 seconds. Admittedly I don't see what a progress-bar-like-widget contributes there, but it's not *really* a progress bar, it just looks like one - it doesn't actually take 5 seconds to 'boot' grub.
It seems to me like we might want to co-ordinate work on the multiboot grub config fd.o spec thing you're working on, and revising how we do bootloader configuration, if we're going to do that.
I tried breaking this thread down into its components and summarizing the discussion and points brought up thus far. I hope it helps:
http://blog.linuxgrrl.com/2013/03/12/improving-the-fedora-boot-experience/
~m
On 12 March 2013 20:53, Máirín Duffy duffy@fedoraproject.org wrote:
I tried breaking this thread down into its components and summarizing the discussion and points brought up thus far. I hope it helps:
http://blog.linuxgrrl.com/2013/03/12/improving-the-fedora-boot-experience/
Thanks Máirín. It should be brltty (with an L, not an I). Sorry if I spent it wrong the first time. You might want to update your blog entry to the correct spelling.
http://mielke.cc/brltty/index.html
brltty is in Fedora already so it should not be a difficult thing to start it. The main thing is to have it running and for the installer interface to be compatible with it (anaconda isn't).
Z.
Hi Zan!
On 03/13/2013 09:44 AM, zan wrote:
Thanks Máirín. It should be brltty (with an L, not an I). Sorry if I spent it wrong the first time. You might want to update your blog entry to the correct spelling.
Whoops, my bad, I fixed it and linked to the upstream link you provided as well.
brltty is in Fedora already so it should not be a difficult thing to start it. The main thing is to have it running and for the installer interface to be compatible with it (anaconda isn't).
Is anaconda supporting it just a matter of brltty running while the installer is running or is it more complex? Do you have any documents / guides that you'd recommend for investigating how to get anaconda to support it?
~m
On 13 March 2013 14:32, Máirín Duffy duffy@fedoraproject.org wrote:
Hi Zan!
On 03/13/2013 09:44 AM, zan wrote:
Thanks Máirín. It should be brltty (with an L, not an I). Sorry if I spent it wrong the first time. You might want to update your blog entry to the correct spelling.
Whoops, my bad, I fixed it and linked to the upstream link you provided as well.
Thanks.
brltty is in Fedora already so it should not be a difficult thing to start it. The main thing is to have it running and for the installer interface to be compatible with it (anaconda isn't).
Is anaconda supporting it just a matter of brltty running while the installer is running or is it more complex? Do you have any documents / guides that you'd recommend for investigating how to get anaconda to support it?
It is unfortunately more complicated. Most graphical toolkits now provide hooks that you can use to scrape the screen with. Anaconda does not have any way to get information about what is going on from brltty's point of view. I have not looked at the Anaconda code in quite some time. I imagine it could be patched to provide them, but I do remember thinking that it did not look very straightforward, even though there is an API provided by brltty for this sort of thing. There is a fedora usability group, where it has been discussed from time to time, especially whenever the Anaconda folks are proposing to look at making changes. We have asked several times for brltty support to be included, but without success so far. It is always going to be a problem when people are busy and donating their free time, and most of the developers are not able to test it themselves.
Z.
Hi Zan,
On 03/13/2013 10:46 AM, zan wrote:
It is unfortunately more complicated. Most graphical toolkits now provide hooks that you can use to scrape the screen with. Anaconda does not have any way to get information about what is going on from brltty's point of view. I have not looked at the Anaconda code in quite some time. I imagine it could be patched to provide them, but I do remember thinking that it did not look very straightforward, even though there is an API provided by brltty for this sort of thing. There is a fedora usability group, where it has been discussed from time to time, especially whenever the Anaconda folks are proposing to look at making changes. We have asked several times for brltty support to be included, but without success so far. It is always going to be a problem when people are busy and donating their free time, and most of the developers are not able to test it themselves.
With the new UI rewrite, we did update the Anaconda UI code to use GTK3 and python GObject introspection, do you know if those changes might make it easier to support brltty?
~m
----- Original Message -----
Hi Zan!
brltty is in Fedora already so it should not be a difficult thing to start it. The main thing is to have it running and for the installer interface to be compatible with it (anaconda isn't).
Is anaconda supporting it just a matter of brltty running while the installer is running or is it more complex? Do you have any documents / guides that you'd recommend for investigating how to get anaconda to support it?
Can I suggest that the live installer is a much better approach to accessible installation ? You have the entire desktop accessibility infrastructure available there, including on-screen keyboard, screen reader, zoom, keyboard a11y, etc...
On 13 March 2013 15:30, Matthias Clasen mclasen@redhat.com wrote:
----- Original Message -----
Hi Zan!
brltty is in Fedora already so it should not be a difficult thing to start it. The main thing is to have it running and for the installer interface to be compatible with it (anaconda isn't).
Is anaconda supporting it just a matter of brltty running while the installer is running or is it more complex? Do you have any documents / guides that you'd recommend for investigating how to get anaconda to support it?
Can I suggest that the live installer is a much better approach to accessible installation ? You have the entire desktop accessibility infrastructure available there, including on-screen keyboard, screen reader, zoom, keyboard a11y, etc...
I can see what you are saying, but it seems like a bit of a compromise, perhaps because it is? I know that debian's installer and livecd support it, so surely we can too? Having said that, it would be nice if the liveDVD included Orca and so on. I have considered creating an "accessible" spin, with all of the necessary things included, but just have not had the time so far. Furthermore, it seems a shame to keep it separate from the main desktop live image. Personally I would much prefer an inclusive approach, rather than essentially implying (albeit unintentionally) that visually impaired people should be kept separate and given special treatment.
Z.
Can I suggest that the live installer is a much better approach to accessible installation ? You have the entire desktop accessibility infrastructure available there, including on-screen keyboard, screen reader, zoom, keyboard a11y, etc...
I can see what you are saying, but it seems like a bit of a compromise, perhaps because it is? I know that debian's installer and livecd support it, so surely we can too? Having said that, it would be nice if the liveDVD included Orca and so on. I have considered creating an "accessible" spin, with all of the necessary things included, but just have not had the time so far. Furthermore, it seems a shame to keep it separate from the main desktop live image. Personally I would much prefer an inclusive approach, rather than essentially implying (albeit unintentionally) that visually impaired people should be kept separate and given special treatment.
My only experience with this -- being a normally-sighted linux user -- was a few years ago at a local LUG meeting during which the presentation topic was to the effect of "Linux accessibility".
The two presenters were blind, and used Ubuntu, or a derivative of it (out of France, as I recall) whose principal distinction for them was that it was pretty much the only distro, or certainly the best by far (at the time, anyway) that allowed them to download, burn, and then install the distro easily and without the help of a sighted person -- because the text-to-speech abilities were enabled and integrated at the installer level. Whether the "only" or "best" part included French support (their being native French speakers) is now beyond my recollection, although I think this is a red herring in any case (since I presume that Ubuntu has always had excellent localization support).
As a side issue (and one of the integral side-show components to the meeting) these two guys were able to navigate their systems far better and faster than I, and I suspect many others -- and not just because I am not as technically capable as many. Any doubts I may have had about the blind being able to use computers easily were dispelled rather spectacularly that evening, with the one exception of ease of installation.
So I am certainly in favour of making the option of installing Fedora "accessible" a mainstream option. However I will of course leave the "how" to those more wise and capable than myself, but I do wish to underline the part I mention above "that allowed them to download, burn, and then install the distro easily and without the help of a sighted person".
Thank you
On 03/13/2013 11:30 AM, Matthias Clasen wrote:
Can I suggest that the live installer is a much better approach to accessible installation ? You have the entire desktop accessibility infrastructure available there, including on-screen keyboard, screen reader, zoom, keyboard a11y, etc...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but live install essentially dd's the live media's system to the hard drive and the user cannot configure the software selection beyond what's provided in the live install media, right?
For headless servers (which I admit are far less important to support in Fedora than they are for RHEL, but the installer is the same regardless) this isn't a workable solution because the user would then post-install have to remove all of the X and GNOME bits. For Fedora, I could this still being a valid concern for someone wanting to deploy Fedora to a cloud service to develop/host something on it - but then again I don't know if the VNC to graphical anaconda would work in such an environment, or if interfacing through VNC would make brltty not work correctly. I could see though, if you have no intention of using the graphical environment in a cloud usage scenario and perhaps even no way of accessing it, not wanting it running at all since you get charged per CPU & RAM usage and I imagine having a running graphical stack, even if you're not actively using it, would use more CPU cycles and RAM than not having it installed at all.
There isn't a way to run a live media graphical install and have it result in a non-graphical system, is there?
In any case, using the DVD installer will enable you to run through a graphical install process that results in a headless system and there is a strong set of use cases for the installer needing to support that right now.
~m
On Wed, 2013-03-13 at 13:08 -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:
There isn't a way to run a live media graphical install and have it result in a non-graphical system, is there?
No code exists to do this, but from what I can read of the anaconda code, it might be just about this simple:
$ git diff diff --git a/pyanaconda/__init__.py b/pyanaconda/__init__.py index ba4e3c5..759d30e 100644 --- a/pyanaconda/__init__.py +++ b/pyanaconda/__init__.py @@ -128,7 +128,7 @@ class Anaconda(object): if not klass: from flags import flags
- if flags.livecdInstall: + if flags.livecdInstall and not ('installmethod=rpm' in open('/proc/cmdline').read()): from pyanaconda.packaging.livepayload import LiveImagePayload klass = LiveImagePayload else:
Then you'd boot the cd with installmethod=rpm. Obviously an ugly hack, and really anaconda would need some sort of UI for "I want to install this system as I see it" versus "Give me list of packages to install"
Well, "git grep livecdInstall" shows other hits so there may be more special casing, but anyways there's not really any *major* technical difference between "standalone anaconda generated by lorax" and a "regular live system with anaconda running as an app".
In this model, anaconda could actually be a "spin" living in spin-kickstarts, except that lorax strips out far more than is possible via RPM alone.
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