bsdtalk199 - PC-Sysinstall with John Hixson

Also Available via Phone: +1 (210) 957-5481

John Hixson has been hacking on the PC Sysinstall from PC-BSD to make it work on FreeBSD.  He has also been working on a curses based front end to it for both PC-BSD and FreeBSD.  The new changes for this front end work will allow any front end to work with the PC Sysinstall backend.  He is also working on implementing PC Sysinstall into FreeNAS.

FreeBSD Sysinstall works as an admin tool, but PC Sysinstall isn't quite ready to be used as a sysadmin tool to reconfigure a system.  However, support for that is in the plans.  There are also plans for creating scripted install support for installing on an identical setup on multiple machines and netbooting.

PC Sysinstall handles many more disk setups during install than the traditional FreeBSD sysinstall.  It also supports installs over FTP.

ISO image installers are not available yet, but should be soon.

You can currently install FreeBSD using the graphical installer from PC Sysinstall.

FreeBSD's sysinstall is pretty dated and ugly.  There has been a lot of features added to FreeBSD that aren't supported by sysinstall.  So this new installer is long over due for FreeBSD.