Hi Mike, Mike Pogue wrote: > In my humble opinion, the graphical installation experience is tremendously > important. > Agreed completely. > Why? A developer starts to form opinions of Solaris/OpenSolaris almost > immediately from the look and feel of the initial install (on their laptop, > most likely). Even if they use something like jumpstart later, that initial > install experience sticks with them. Yes, I've seen the mockup of what the > install experience might look like in the future (I give it a 5 out of 10, > maybe... :-). > > So, how can it be better? Well, before we try to answer that, I figure we > should all first be familiar with what other OS's are doing out there in the > way of installation. And, not everybody has the time to go do a bunch of > installs themselves, just to form an opinion on graphical installation > techniques. > > So, I've been busy doing some screen capturing for several OS's, so that > everybody (yes, you) can participate in this discussion. Here is my first > try at presenting the results: > > http://www.zenstarstudio.com/install > > I did installs of various OS's (Windows XP, S11b43, SuSE10, Ubuntu) under > VMWare Workstation, and screen-captured the results. I post-processed these > down to individual frames, 1 second apart, and then I went through and picked > up frames whenever anything interesting had changed. I organized these > sequentially, made thumbnails (automatically -- I'm not completely crazy), > and I squished the whole thing into a couple of (somewhat ragged) web pages. > Oh, and of course, I had to add some snarky one-line comments about each > page, too. > > Note: The last 2 thumbnails on the Ubuntu page are what happens when you pop > the Ubuntu CD into a Windows box. Interesting idea, eh? > > I invite you to check 'em out, compare and contrast the various installers, > and join the discussion! > This is good stuff. Some initial things are obvious:
1. The Solaris installer asks *way* to many system configuration questions before even starting the installation. And, it is actually confusing because halfway through the whole process we switch to the installation without what appears to me an obvious transition, it almost looks like we started over with the install with the 2 'Welcome' screens. I am not sure we should really call these two things, that is the initial system configuration we must gather and then the installation data, out separately. 2. SuSE asks only a few questions prior to install and then asks the rest of the configuration questions after rebooting. But, the screen that says 'Installation Complete' after doing the post-initial install system configuration seems confusing to me as a user. 3. I don't like the 'notes' shown during the windows installation, the why windows xp is so great stuff. Just my opinion. 4. Ubuntu gets to the point quickly to get an install done. Although some of your thumbnails for this don't appear to show anything really happening at some points during the install. So, since you have seen the proposed new install experience you are obviously aware we are working on Solaris install. The data you have here is excellent and a clear and easy way to see the user interface differences of the various installers. Thank you for doing this. I did not see any of the snarky one-line comments you mention above. Did I miss that somehow? My question to you now is, now that you have seen these different installers and you rate our proposed new installation experience a 5 out of 10, what specific recommendations do you have to improve that score, and why? Specifically I am interested in your thoughts on things like: 1. Look and feel improvements 2. Flow of control improvements 3. Which of the install experiences you have captured do you like best and why? 4. If we could combine the best of these experiences what would that look like? I think that I personally need to think about what might be the specific differences with Solaris that might not fit easily in to some of these other install experiences. Do we have special configuration needs, special 'target' needs, things like that. This is good stuff. Thanks for taking the time to help and contribute. sarah **** > Note: I had trouble downloading RH from their website, so I don't yet have > any screen captures for that OS. Maybe they knew what I was going to do? :-) > > Mike > > P.S. Feel free to contribute a better display page for these. Locations of > the full and thumb images are obvious from looking at the page source. If I > were a Flash programmer (which I'm not), I probably would have made a > horizontal scrolling thingie to display the thumbnails -- that would have > taken up much less vertical room than the CSS thing that I did. > > P.P.S. If the OpenSolaris install community wants to host this stuff, that > would be a good idea, too. I don't know when my site bandwidth will run out! > > > This message posted from opensolaris.org > _______________________________________________ > install-discuss mailing list > install-discuss at opensolaris.org > http://opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/install-discuss > >
