Hey Shawn,

* Shawn Walker (swalker at opensolaris.org) wrote:
> Glenn Lagasse wrote:
> >Hi Sue,
> >
> >* Susan Sohn (Susan.Sohn at Sun.COM) wrote:
> >>I have posted the functional specification for the Text Installer at:
> >>
> >>http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/caiman/TextInstallerProject/spec_v1
> >>
> >>Please review and provide comments by Tuesday, July 14, at 5pm Pacific.
> >
> >1.5 Supported Configurations
> >
> >Do we really need to keep the memory requirement at 512M for a purely
> >text based install?  It would seem to me that we could get by
> >comfortably with a lot less than what we require for a gui install.
> 
> It depends on what is installing.  In the context of the Live CD, it
> makes perfect sense.

Right, the liveCD with the gui installer.

> In that, while you might get by with it during install, a system
> with < 512MB installed using the current live CD contents will be of
> questionable use, especially with a zfs root, right?

Potentially.  A stripped down install runs pretty well in 256M (at least
in my hacking experiments).  I wouldn't use it for much but some might
find it useful.

> I personally would expect the requirements to vary based on whether
> the automated installer, Live CD, etc. is being used and what the
> actual system, once installed really needs to be of practical use.

Precisely, and that's what I mean.  We're talking about a piece of media
that has no GUI and boots to essentially the command line and runs a cli
command (text installer).  Loading X and Gnome is a pretty large portion
of the memory consumer on the current liveCD.  Since we won't be loading
those things on the text installer media, the barrier is much lower.
 
> I also might add that some projects, such as the packagemanager GUI,
> have been basing certain decision on the current requirements, not
> lower ones.

Right, we're strictly talking about memory to run a text based
installer.  Now I suppose if we were to allow running the text based
installer from a gnome-terminal once booted into Gnome from something
like the current liveCD then we'd need to keep the requirement at 512
(possibly, I doubt a text installer without any GTK dependencies is
going to require the same amount of memory as the current gui
installer).  But in the scenarios mentioned in the spec, we're not
loading X or Gnome and thus memory savings abounds from what I recall
when last I looked at this back in November and would allow us to
require less memory to actually get an install done.

Cheers,

-- 
Glenn

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