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 7.0-RELEASE, but the intention is to keep it as a “second” installer system during 7.x, alongside sysinstall. 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 [:finstall/Architecture:Currently proposed achitecture] for finstall.

Currently forseeable milestones / deliverables are:

• [:finstall/SurveyOfExistingInstallers:Survey of existing graphical installers]
• [:finstall/FirstStep: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: Second step (Live boot CD is working!).

Future plans: A SourceForge project will be started so people who don't have a FreeBSD.Org account can contribute to the project.

[:finstall/ToDo:Random To-Do list]

• 2007-11-03 : A LiveCD with BETA1 or BETA2 version of FreeBSD 7 will be released to public soon
• 2007-08-20 : The installer successfully installs a basic “Amnesiac” FreeBSD system on an empty drive! See screenshots at [“finstall/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 [“finstall/FirstStep”].