Many enterprise customers perform interactive installations on systems in datacenters. These systems are often, but not always, installed in a rack environment and do not have a display, keyboard, or mouse. Additionally, a lot of these systems even lack the ability to connect a graphical display. Given that enterprise hardware rarely needs that ability at the physical system, this hardware configuration is acceptable.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Fedora Linux installer ( anaconda ) offers users two interactive modes of operation. The original mode is a text-based interface. The newer mode uses GTK+ and runs in the X Window environment. The purpose of this document is to explain how the graphical installation mode can be used in enterprise environments, even when the system lacks a proper display and input devices typically associated with a workstation.

The primary driver behind the document is to encourage use of the graphical installer, even in enterprise environments. The text mode environment lacks a lot of capabilities found in the graphical mode. Many users still feel that the text mode interface provides them with additional power or configuration ability not found in the graphical version. The opposite is true. Much less development effort is put in to the text mode environment and specific things (e.g., LVM configuration) are deliberately left out of the text mode environment. The reasons for this are:

All of these reasons and more are why you, the enterprise customer, should be making using of the Virtual Network Computing (VNC) mode offered in anaconda . VNC allows the graphical mode of the installer to run locally, but display on a system connected to the network.