Well, I just downloaded the latest test track for the eCS 1.1 install. This is RC1 Release 9, for any of you that care about the niceties of revision numbering.

It has come a LONG way over the last few months. Now, it's detecting almost all of the hardware in my system correctly and setting it up both in the preboot menu (you get to pick which devices to load before you boot the CD) and in the installation routine. The only thing I had to do was to reverse a couple of the selections; it wanted to boot off the IDE interface and I wanted it to load one of the SCSI cards first. It automatically detected the USB interface on the mainboard as well and set that up too.

System setup is done before any copying is done; once you've configured everything, it's a "fire and forget" install. It uses the IBM CID engine to do the installations for the most part; the program makes "response files" for CID based on the selections the user makes.

There are a lot of new fonts included; I haven't yet had time to explore them all so I'm going to have to get back on that.

It detected my network card automatically, and I was able to completely configure my networking before install, save the automatic launching of any daemons that I might want. This is a good thing, in my view; it helps keep the default install more network secure.

Slick slick it's sooooo slick! I think we've got a winner here.