Hi, At $DAYJOB I'm currently supporting a piece of software for which I provide binary packages for a number of distributions. As part of that, I find myself having to install a Fedora or CentOS VM occasionally.
I can't help but notice that their current installer is extremely easy to use; and that, as compared to ours, it seems like a huge step forwards: - First screen of the installer allows to select a language - Second screen has three sections: "Localisation" (which has a button for selecting the keyboard layout, one for language support allowing to select additional languages, and one for time/date settings), "Software" (with a button for the installation source and their equivalent of tasksel), and "System" (which has a button for their partitioner and one for the network configuration) - The partitioner defaults to "automatic partitioning", but you have to enter it and confirm it by selecting the proper hard disk (presumably so you can't accidentally overwrite your data) - Once you make the correct settings in that screen, you click on "Start installation". The next screen will cause the actual installation to start (i.e., the installer will partition & format hard disks, start downloading packages, and install them). It also has two buttons for user settings (you can enter a root password and/or create a non-root user). ... and that's it. I think that their installer is much easier to use for inexperienced users than is ours, and that we should take a good look at what they've done and see if we can make improvements to ours so that it would support a similar experience. That doesn't have to mean we need to completely rewrite our installer; e.g., we could write a udeb which asks the user as many questions as possible without moving on, and then uses preseeding to preset settings for the current udebs. Such an installer wouldn't support *every* use case, but that's fine; since, in essence, we'd just be providing an alternate UI to the same installer, people who need some of the more advanced options can ditch the hand-holding UI and switch to the advanced UI. We could add a button "skip this screen" to make that easier, if needs be. Thoughts? -- Could you people please use IRC like normal people?!? -- Amaya Rodrigo Sastre, trying to quiet down the buzz in the DebConf 2008 Hacklab