Rather than chaining onto the end of the now huge GIE thread, and because this view diverges from much of the mainstream, I thought it best to set this apart as a separate perspective. But it's just my $.02.
With apologies for a digression, let me zoom the lens way out and the wall clock back, for a moment, to get another perspective, then I'll segue that back to the install issues at hand. If I were to set about designing an operating system for millions of office and home desktops and laptops, fundamentally to serve the immediate needs of a non-technical individual: word processing, calendaring, printing, etc., and I wanted to do well against my competition in a copyrighted, millions-of-burgers-sold world, I would probably come pretty close to what Win is today. Keeping my target audience in focus, I would hide, to the greatest extent possible, as many technical details as possible and still be fit for purpose. I would assume as little as possible my target user's technical knowledge--and patience for technical tedium. The focus would be computing to support the individual office user with an individual office computer. UNIX, otoh, hails from a time when computers were a little too unwieldy and expensive to be personal, and so the scalable, multi-user, multi-resource approach became at more or less the outset and in the core of the OS's DNA (although Ken's PDP-7 was probably more or less personal :-) Also, users of computing could be [i]assumed[/i] to be technical, since computing was not yet ubiquitous. Mostly, the users were the producers. UNIX evolved, though a little bifurcated, between AT&T and UCB, the latter noticeably contributing much networking innovation (there were ARPANET sockets, and Biff always barked at the mailman). Bill Jolitz and others foresaw the possibilities of porting UNIX to individually-affordable Intel-based machines, and UNIX/UN*X was off and running. Fast forward, zoom the lens back to normal focal length, a whole big bunch of stuff happened, and here is Solaris--a blend of many of the best technological ideas of 30+ years, a masterpiece of power and scaleability, capable of digesting the computing requirements of the largest enterprises. In my view, Solaris fulfills the destiny of UNIX: that UNIX could meet or exceed all that MULTICS hoped to be--and did largely achieve--as MULTICS was a masterpiece in its own right. OS install experiences typically are targeted to the greatest common denominator in technical expertise, across the range of their likely users. But these ranges differ: the typical target installer of Windows likely has different requirements, goals and levels of technical expertise than the UNIX sysadmin. To suggest that the overall quality of Solaris could in some way be judged by the snazziness of its install GUI seems to me equivalent to suggesting that the overall quality of a Boeing 767 can be determined by the available upholstery color combinations on the flight deck. If you are installing Solaris, then most likely you have selected Solaris for the application, based on your judgement from prior knowledge and experience in operating systems. We don't need to market too much at that point. I think we can assume that you know what Solaris is, that you know what you are doing, and that you have consciously decided on Solaris over, say, a Linux distro, for your own specific and technical reasons. I hold that this suggests that you don't need to be splashfully entertained a whole lot while installing, and moreover, that such antics may even be [i]counterproductive[/i] to a trouble-free install. You most likely know exactly what you want done for the install, what to put where, and what configurations to set. Any CPU/graphical engine cycle not devoted to [i]install action[/i] is a candidate for a wasted cycle. Have a GUI environment at all? Sure--no intention here to bash GUI's in general--you can open up an xterm and do some local stuff while the install proceeds, etc. (just being careful not to step on feet). As far as unabashed marketing during our install--did someone say "popup ads"?--what a way to treat a masterpiece--one might as well try to market the latest in sunglasses by putting a pair on Michelangelo's [i]David[/I]. [Analogy backfire--actually they'd probably sell millions due to schlock shock alone...] Summary: Make the install experience efficient but robust, clean, and most importantly, professional and reserved in appearance, befitting a system of this quality. Assume the installer knows what s/he is doing: allow overrides and do-it-anyway-because-I-say-so's as much as possible. When in doubt, understate rather than overstate. Your installer/user/sysadmin has already been sold on the product. This message posted from opensolaris.org
