Red Hat's Jiri Konecny announced work to modernize and improve the user interface of the Anaconda installer used in Fedora, RHEL, CentOS and several other Linux distributions. It is noteworthy that instead of the GTK library, the new interface will be built on the basis of web technologies and will allow remote control via a web browser. It is noted that the decision to rework the installer has already been made, but the implementation is still at the stage of a working prototype, not ready for demonstration.
The new interface is based on components of the Cockpit project, used in Red Hat products for configuring and managing servers. Cockpit was selected as a well-proven solution with backend support for interacting with the installer (Anaconda DBus). In addition, the use of Cockpit will allow for consistency and unification of various system management components. The use of a web interface will significantly increase the convenience of remote control of the installation, which cannot be compared with the current solution based on the VNC protocol.
The interface rework will build on the work already done to make the installer more modular and will not significantly affect Fedora users, since the bulk of Anaconda has already been converted into modules that interact through the DBus API, and the new interface will use the ready-made API without internal rework. The dates for the start of public testing of the new interface and readiness for its promotion to the upstream at this stage of development are not specified, but the developers promise to periodically publish reports on the development of the project.
Source: opennet.ru