I've noticed a trend of increasing newbie friendliness in the liveCDs which seem to waste more time for experienced users sometimes. A good example is how it automatically wastes time trying to detect hardware such as the NIC, then it tries to DHCP usually (with a 60 second timeout). Other people say there are problems with scsi detection too. Not that I don't appreciate the efforts, but I think since we have such nice install docs, it's not necessary to force these time consuming tasks on all users (after all, you don't have a choice of whether or not you want to use DHCP). It would be nice if the automated stuff was put into an install script that could be optionally run. One possibility would be to have it ask you: Do you want to automatically configure and detect hardware? [Y]/N (5 seconds...) Let me know what you guys think about this ;) Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
You can just boot with the "nodetect" option. This option forgoes all hardware detection. We really do not force anything upon the users except simple detection of a NIC, mouse, vid card, etc. Everything else, including SCSI, is optional. Providing an option like the one you proposed would be duplicating code. I see where you are coming from, but every person in our userbase is not a linux hacker. If we took away autodetection, I can assure you that there would be screaming. If you hate it so much, just boot w/ "nodetect".
There's also "nodhcp", which forgoes the DHCP detection. Also, I am working on a new version of the livecd-tools, which will cause dhcp detection to progress in the background, rather than hold up the boot process.
Also, John... This should be WONTFIX, as we won't fix it... *grin*
Moving these so we can remove the "Install CD" component from "Gentoo Linux". I apologize to everyone for this spam, but according to the bugzilla developers, this is the only reasonable way to do this.
