Pinderkent

I read today about the finstall effort for FreeBSD. It is a GUI installer for FreeBSD. Although it sounds like a helpful tool for some users, I don't think I'd want it to replace the existing sysinstall installation system.

One of the main benefits of sysinstall is that it's not a GUI installer. This means that it has relatively minimal requirements when it comes to video hardware. Furthermore, it is very usable when using only the keyboard. Thus, it isn't necessary to even have a mouse available. So it remains a very viable option, especially in hardware-limited situations.

Another benefit is that it's well-tested. It's been used in several major releases of FreeBSD now, and can be considered quite mature. For those of us who have used FreeBSD for a long time, we're quite familiar with how it works, and what its limitations are. It will no doubt take much time and effort to bring finstall to the quality level that sysinstall currently exhibits.

Being written in C, sysinstall is quite performant. This is important on older systems, which might not cope as well with the overhead of the Python-based finstall. Thankfully, those behind the finstall project seem to realize this, and have indicated in their blog entry that for the backend, "a C version that can be included in FreeBSD base system is planned."

I wish the best of luck to the finstall developers in their quest to develop a GUI installer for FreeBSD. But I do hope that FreeBSD retains the sysinstall installer, or at least a tool that is equivalent in most ways.