Anaconda is getting a new suit (Fedora Community Blog)

Posted Jan 11, 2022 21:15 UTC (Tue) by epithumia (subscriber, #23370)
In reply to: Anaconda is getting a new suit (Fedora Community Blog) by mathstuf
Parent article: Anaconda is getting a new suit (Fedora Community Blog)

Anaconda has supported VNC for a very long time. I've done many thousands of Fedora installs, and RHL installs before that, without having to sit at the machines. You can also SSH in but as far as I know you can't actually use that to interact with the installer.

Perhaps soon you'll be able to connect with a browser, which I suppose is fine, but it doesn't really offer that much in the way of new capability. I imagine this is primarily an issue of simplification of code maintenance.

Anaconda is getting a new suit (Fedora Community Blog)

Posted Jan 12, 2022 5:36 UTC (Wed) by champtar (subscriber, #128673) [Link] (1 responses)

If I remember correctly once you are connected via ssh you can attach to the installer tmux session (tmux a).

Anaconda is getting a new suit (Fedora Community Blog)

Posted Jan 13, 2022 2:00 UTC (Thu) by m4rtink (guest, #95458) [Link]

Oh, that's clever! While I don't think this is officially supported (or even documented) it makes sense. The Anaconda TUI runs in a tmux session, so if you can connect to that somehow, you are good to go. :)

Anaconda is getting a new suit (Fedora Community Blog)

Posted Jan 13, 2022 1:58 UTC (Thu) by m4rtink (guest, #95458) [Link]

Current remote GUI support via VNC has several serious drawbacks:

- rendering happens on the machine, so slower machines (cheap ARM SBCs, etc.) might struggle
- all the graphical deps need to be on the image, making the image larger
- the rendered bitmaps are then transferred over network, which is not very efficient
- VNC traffic is not encrypted and VNC has a low maximum password leangth (!)
- lastly, you need a VNC client installed, while almost anyone will likely have a browser

In comparison a modern remote Web UI renders on client, transfers very little and all data goes over HTTPS.