Creating a terminal-based installer / wizard

Question

I would like to create a terminal based installer / wizard.

Ideally, it would be like a Ubuntu server installer or an Arch Linux installer - a heavy ncurses (?) Graphical interface with lots of forms and keyboard-friendliness.

The second best would be a simpler question / answer topic similar to the adduser command asking for a password, username, etc.

I'm Ruby biased and would prefer a scripting language (rather than C), but I'm open to anything. It will only work on an Ubuntu server if that helps.

What are my options?

Answer 1

I'm not sure what you are asking. If you are looking for an implementation tool, you can look at urwid , which is a Python-based GUI tool library. It allows you to write programs using GTK style widgets and event interfaces for the text interface. If you're a decent script, it shouldn't be too hard to start writing code from there to start the installation process.

Answer 2

InstallJammer can do what you want in the second form. The ncurses interface does not talk about this. 0-] It is written in Tcl / Tk, so it meets your scripting requirements, although it is obviously not in your language of choice. I guess we all have our language of choice. 0 -]

Answer 3

It would be easier to answer if you indicated what you were trying to do. If you are installing something, it might make sense to just create a debian package and use the installation time configuration options available through debhelper.

If bash or the shell script is fine, I would suggest looking at the package dialog. Just put the "dialog" as pre-dependent on your package, and you can use the dialog functions for your deb installer.

Another option might be the pdmenu package (origin: http://kitenet.net/~joey/code/pdmenu/ ).