Category Archives: installer

EuroBSDCon Presentation on pc-sysinstall

There was a lot of interest about the changes to the pc-sysinstall backend during Kris Moore’s presentation at EuroBSDCon. For those of you used to FreeBSD’s sysinstall, you’ll appreciate some of the features which are available in pc-sysinstall. For those of you new to pc-sysinstall, it is a scriptable command line utility which drives the PC-BSD GUI installer (and can also be used for system administrators to script custom installs). It has been totally redesigned for PC-BSD 9 and supports modern FreeBSD filesystems (ZFS, UFS+J), gpart, and geli.

EuroBSDCon Presentation on pc-sysinstall

There was a lot of interest about the changes to the pc-sysinstall backend during Kris Moore’s presentation at EuroBSDCon. For those of you used to FreeBSD’s sysinstall, you’ll appreciate some of the features which are available in pc-sysinstall. For those of you new to pc-sysinstall, it is a scriptable command line utility which drives the PC-BSD GUI installer (and can also be used for system administrators to script custom installs). It has been totally redesigned for PC-BSD 9 and supports modern FreeBSD filesystems (ZFS, UFS+J), gpart, and geli.

Florent Thoumie » FreeBSD 2010-06-25 09:01:01

I had a nice surprise reading my Facebook timeline this morning: Matt Olander announcing that Warner Losh committed the PC-BSD installer backend to the FreeBSD SVN repository.

I didn’t know anything about it before BSDCan this year, so here’s a quick summary of what I remember (and is of interest, to me at least):

  • Can install either PC-BSD or vanilla FreeBSD

  • Supports ZFS and GELI partitions

  • The backend is all shell and quite easy to read/modify to suit your needs

  • There are at least two frontends: a QT one (default for PC-BSD) and a dialog/curses (not quite sure, fairly recent in any case) one that looks like it would be a good drop-in replacement for sysinstall.

  • It supports a configuration file that isn’t dissimilar to the one you can use with sysinstall at the moment: the frontend actually only generates a config file and the backend does the job without intervention.

So really, how is that for morning awesomeness?

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