BSD Installer Technology Preview (2005.0616) Available - please help test

[Chris Pressey]

Hi all,

A new "technology preview" of the installer is available.  We'd really
appreciate help testing it.  A DragonFly LiveCD (1.3.2-DEVELOPMENT from
June 16th) containing the installer is available from the following
URL.  (Since this is -DEVELOPMENT, it might not be perfectly stable,
but it should suffice for testing installation.)

http://cvs.bsdinstaller.org/iso-images/dfly-2005.0616-installer-preview.iso.bz2

This is the "next generation" installer backend; it has been rewritten
almost entirely in Lua (http://www.lua.org/), with bindings to C
libraries only where required.  As a result of the reorganization, and
due to the properties of Lua (memory management, associative data
structures, function closures, object-orientation, etc), we feel that
the maintainability (or hackability, if you like) of the source base has
increased by at least an order of magnitude.

The rewritten installer also has several significant new features,
including:

- "Pre-Install Tasks" (walks you through common things to set up first)
- NLS (Natural Language Services (gettext)), thanks to Denis Peplin
- User may load any number of KLDs (kernel modules) before starting
- Support for configuring NIC by IPv6 router announcements (NEEDS TEST)
- Primary (BIOS) Partition Editor (no need to run fdisk manually)
- User may select extra filesystems to be put in fstab (procfs, cdrom)
- Upgrade from FreeBSD 4.x or DragonFly, to DragonFly (NEEDS TEST)
- NetBoot server can co-operate better with existing LAN (NEEDS TEST)

Some minor features (such as "Esc" key to cancel) are still missing, but
will soon be re-added.

If I receive positive feedback on this preview, I'd like to move forward
and refine it into the 2.0 version of the BSD Installer.

Thank you!
-Chris