Hi,
The installer is looking really good now (except the package chooser
ofcourse!). The screens which are displayed while installing are really
really good.. they give the user a lot of information about linux mandrake
and linux in general.. but maybe you should put more of them to last atleast
5-7 mints.. the current ones last only 3 mints and start repeating :(
- Do a spell check.. I saw a "clic" when it shld be "click" (on ther server
slide)
- "Thank you to have chosen LM" is IMHO wrong english.. how about "Thank you
for choosing LM"? Please have someone really good at english review the
slides.. the professionalism will go away otherwise.
Ok, now other things:
1> Still I see only 2/3rd of the installation screen on the entire monitor on
the SGI Zx10 workstation... somebody please do something.. get specs from my
previous mail on cooker
2> More woes on package selection: "Internet station" still has horrible
tooltip.. rewrite it in plain english with names of known applications! not
tin, pine etc please!
3> Why are "games", "multimedia", "network client", "console" not chosen when
they totally contribute to less than 20-30 MB i think and are really really
useful and important! Even default selecting "documents" won't be bad. IMHO,
a newbie who dosn't understand what to do (or is simply lazy or wants to just
say ok to whateveris default) might simply say "OK" and he won't get any
multimedia, games applications.. and that'll be strange.. again I request..
please revisit package selection.. (and an install "everything" magic!)
4> X was not configured again.. the machine just locks up.. and I have to
press CAD to reboot..
5> I finally found (I think) that its LILO that mandrake now uses.. Maybe a
"Press <esc> to go to lilo prompt" be nice! It'll first of all help users
know that its lilo, and 2ndly in critical times, it'll help them to go to the
lilo prompt!
6> I don't have NT installed on the machine.. but it shows NT in the
selecter! Actually I have two SCSI disks.. and I never formatted the 2nd
one.. maybe its because of that? I also tried to say boot NT and it dosn't do
nething.. obv cause there is no NT..
7> I could never boot into the machine.. This time aurora comes up.. but
again I can see only 2/3rd of the screen. This default aurora just shows the
current log output (one line only) and that looks really ugly and
unprofessional esp when there are too many errors. How about:
- Sending all output to another console.. so if a user wants to look at
whats actually going on, he/she will press Ctrl-Alt-F2 or whatever.
- Remove any sort of ugly output from this aurora
- Always have a "Linux Mandrake 8.0" written on all your screens.. this
makes a BIG difference.. it shows that u are professional. I have asked this
a lot of times, but still there is no mention of linux mandrake while booting
(in aurora) or on the login screen. Thats bad :(
8> There is a line of "stars" at the bottom of aurora which keeps
incrementing.. I found that each star is for an error message.. now thats
strange! A star for an error message?? Then there are 5 icons at the bottom
and a square around them keeps shiting from one icon to another in a random
fashion! A more logical way would be to move from left to right indicating
progres.. right now there is nothign that indicates progress and the user
never knows when the machine will stop doing the bootup! I would rather have
the other aurora that came with LM7.2 than this one.. there are just too many
wrong things about this one. I think these small,artistic,professional
touches need to be taken care of.. If the RC1 is released as it is, it'll
look very bad during boot-up. The icons simply don't mean anything..
9> The machine dosn't boot up as I said. the last message I see in aurora is
"starting kheader".. and most of the stars below say "httpd:bad group name
apache". The last star says "proftpd: cannot open /etc/groups. bad group
namenoname" (not exactly like this but something similar). What is wrong? I
can ping the machine though.
10> Ok, now I did "failsafe".. The first error message in a nice box I get is
"Cannot set permissions for /var/log/linuxconf/boot.log". Bad group name
root". I say ok, and then 100s of files follow the above one.. so I kept
enter key pressed for quite a while.. then it continued booting.. httpd adn
proftpd gave errors (Pt 9 above). I cannot loign either.. dosn't accept
root/passwd :( Any ideas??
11> Like many others, even I am getting sick of those twin colored icons..
Why is LM making all 2 color icons? only blue and yellow! They really look
kiddish. There are two reasons for the kiddish look: use of only 2 colors
(blue and yellow) and no sharpness in the icons (they are fuzzy with circular
edges everywhere). If mandrake has to show that they are professional, we
really need cool new icons like KDE has.. This can be simply achieved by
using _more_ colors!
Okay, now something from 8.0B3 still remaining..
12> How do I configure LILO now? 7.x had drakboot which allowed to configure
LILO.. now there is no GUI to do that :( And what happened to grub? I still
see some grub entries in /boot... why are they there if GRUB is not used?
13> in 7.x I could format a floppy with drakboot too.. is KFloppy the only
way to format a floppy? I really don't mind coz kfloppy is better than the
old drakboot anyday.
14> Shouldn't ReiserFS be the default FS? ext2 is a pain when the machine is
abnormally rebooted or the power goes off.. I think ReiserFS has matured and
there is no reason why ext2 is default esp. in recommended mode! Or can we
atleast have an choise between ext2 & ReiserFS w/o going to expert mode to do
that?
Since I couldn't boot into RC1, I cannot tell more.
But some cool things that I expected from LM since they are targetting
desktop :
1> Enable LAN/SMB browsing in konqueror by default.
2> Insert userful sites (www and ftp) into konqueror's sidebar..
there are many other cool things that can be pre-configured for the user esp
in KDE.. Is there anyone from LM listening??
LM8.0 is definitely shaping up really really good... but with improvements to
the package selection and look'n'feel, it could be _the_ killer product. So
take more time, but deliver the best!
sarang
