BSDCan2008 - Final - we hope

BSDCan 2008
The Technical BSD Conference

Speakers
Ivan Voras
Schedule
Day Talks - 1 (2008-05-16)
Room H
Start time 11:30
Duration 01:00
Info
ID 69
Event type lecture
Track Hacking
Language en
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"finstall" - the new FreeBSD installer

A graphical installer for FreeBSD

The "finstall" project, sponsored by Google as a Summer of Code 2007 project, is an attempt to create a user-friendly graphical installer for FreeBSD, with enough strong technical features to appeal to the more professional users. A long term goal for it is to be a replacement for sysinstall, and as such should support almost all of the features present in sysinstall, as well as add support for new FreeBSD features such as GEOM, ZFS, etc. This talk will describe the architecture of "finstall" and focus on its lesser known features such as remote installation.

"finstall" is funded by Google SoC as a possible long-term replacement for sysinstall, as a "LiveCD" with the whole FreeBSD base system on the CD, with X11 and XFCE4 GUI. In the talk I intend to describe what I did so far, and what are the future plans for it. This includes the installer GUI, the backend (which has the potential to become a generic FreeBSD configuration backend) and the assorted tools developed for finstall ("LiveCD" creation scripts). More information on finstall can be found here: http://wiki.freebsd.org/finstall .

Biography/Abstract:

Ivan is a post-graduate student at University of Zagreb, Croatia, and has a long record of caring and developing for FreeBSD systems. His BSDCan topic will be about his latest Google Summer of Code project - finstall.

Biography/Description:

Ivan's grad subject is distributed system with emphasis on small networked systems and optimizations. He has been a user of FreeBSD since Y2K and has soon started administrating and developing for FreeBSD. His proposals for Google Summer of Code for the past three years have all been for FreeBSD development and all were accepted. He is also working as a Internet services architect at his University and as an associate editor at a local IT magazine.