Creating a Text-Based Installer

Danny Pearson, Mark Godwin,

Ryan Holden, Thea Gab

Create a text-based installer for Sun Microsystems’s operating system, OpenSolaris.

User’s graphics cards may not be compatible with GNOME.

Systems may only have the capability to display a terminal.

Remote installation.

Please direct your attention to the other screen.

Create a text-based installer for x86 architecture.

Mirror GUI installer’s functionality.

Create the installer on SPARC architecture.

Develop a good working relationship with your team, and always respect their ideas.

Collaborate with as many individuals as you can to gain new perspectives on your design.

Be objective to the decisions you make, and willing to move in a new direction when necessary.

Written in C, uses a NCURSES Interface.

Execution on startup achieved by Service Management Facility (SMF).

Installation performed by an internal Sun library called ‘liborchestrator’.

C library offering terminal manipulation.

Standard library used for text based applications.

reader.c

progressscreen.c

main.c installation screen.c

Installation complete.c

disk.c

welcome.c

formscreen.c

menuscreen.c

textscreen.c

Text filesinstall.txtusers.txtwelcome.txt

Liborchestrator Interaction

NCURSES Interaction

Defines a dependency list of processes to execute on startup.

GRUB init svc.startd

Current text-based installer only supports an initial install. (No upgrade functionality)

Current text-based installer is only localized in the English language.

Current text-based installer does not restrict password characters using a commonly accepted method.

Resolving items on the known bugs list.

Creating help files specific to each of the screens throughout the installation sequence.

Porting the text-based installer to the SPARC architecture.

Providing a purely text-based, NCURSES free installer, for highly limited systems.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them now.