use less instead of more during install / kickstart

[Lars Noodén]

During the install process it is possible to switch to another console and get a shell (using Ctrl-Alt-F2 or Ctrl-Alt-F3).

The paging tool available is 'more', can I ask that 'less' be considered?

more is nice in many situations, but here I use it when checking through the install log and it lacks the ability to stop once the end of the file is reached. The end of the file is often where problems can be seen in the log and it is necessary to scroll back and forth. more also lacks the ability to do regex searching. The last two install logs I checked were around 5700 and 6200 lines long, but without being able to jump to a known marker using regex, it is necessary to scroll carefully through the whole file, careful not to roll off the end.

Two problems with less may be that it is 150K as opposed to more's 39K and that it is stored in /usr/bin as opposed to /bin for more.

If it is possible, having 'less' available in the install console would be a great boon for debugging.

-Lars

FWIW - The context of this request is that I'm working out a custom install using kickstart.

[Pascal De Vuyst (pascal-devuyst)]

What installer do you mean? Did you use the alternate or desktop CD ?

[Lars Noodén (larsnooden)]

At this point I am not sure which one I started with. Possibly the Alternate. None of the files on the CD that I can find give more details beyond that it is Kubuntu and that it is version 7.04 for x86.

If it is very important to know I can try both.

[Pascal De Vuyst (pascal-devuyst)]

It isn't that hard too find out: the desktop cd is a live cd while the alternate cd is only an installer.

[Lars Noodén (larsnooden)]

Ok. Then I'm talking about the Alternate cd, but it might be a good feature for the Desktop cd, too.

[Pascal De Vuyst (pascal-devuyst)]

Reassigning to debian-installer.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Size is a priority, so I suspect we won't do this. I use 'nano -v' myself; it's not perfect but it does the job.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

The desktop CD of course has less, since it's essentially a full Ubuntu installation in its own right.