The finstall project

Welcome to the home page of the finstall project, accepted for Google's Summer of Code 2007. This project aims to create a user-friendly graphical installer for FreeBSD & FreeBSD-derived systems. The project should yield something usable for, but the intention is to keep it as a “second” installer system, alongside sysinstall at least for a while. In any case, sysinstall will be kept for architectures not supported by finstall (e.g. all except i386 and amd64).

Project's author is IvanVoras, with MurrayStokely as mentor.

Read about Currently proposed architecture for finstall. :idea: updated :idea:

Currently forseeable milestones / deliverables are:

• Survey of existing graphical installers
• First step: Build the toolkit (front-end, back-end), do partitioning and simple install capability
• Second step: Live boot CD with rudimentary install (copy) of the system to newly partitioned storage
• Third step: More advanced configuration of the new system

Current status of this project is: Third step (Live boot CD is working!).

:idea: Look for up-to-date news on this project here.

Random To-Do list

• 2007-11-10 : Created a SourceForge.Net project for finstall so people without FreeBSD accounts can join: http://sourceforge.net/projects/finstall
• 2007-11-03 : A LiveCD with BETA2 or later will not be created until the unionfs bug is fixed
• 2007-08-20 : The installer successfully installs a basic “Amnesiac” FreeBSD system on an empty drive! See screenshots at Amnesiac
• 2007-08-05 : I'm on vacation, will be back in a couple of weeks
• 2007-06-16 : things are progessing nicely. I've uploaded a new screenshot at FirstStep.