Hi there, I have some comments about the installer of solaris/nevada, which I would like to share. I have not come here to start a flame war, but to offer suggestions, so please don't take my post the wrong way. Thanks
Bad points: - The installer is quite slow. It takes about 3 minutes to actually get to the stage where you are answering the installers questions on my system. Also there are lots of progress bars that do mysterious time taking things. Could the installer be made quicker by not writing it in java? I bet loading the vm into memory is more than half the boot time for the installer? I might be wrong. - It is difficult to customize packages that are to be installed. Usually choose full distribution because its easy. In reality I will not use 75% of what I am installing. - The install is huge. 6 cd's is to me a huge amount to download. Why not only offer a base install on the cd and then use a tool like openbsd's pkg_add or debians apt-get to only download what you need. Also this gives you the opportunity to have an official sun pkg repository where you can add more packages that need not necessarily be distributed on media. This means you have no 6 disk limitation (does this make sense). I grow quite tired of not being able to get a certain pkg from sun, and having to turn to sunfreeware.com or blastwave.org and installing duplicates of libraries to run the app in question. Also it eats my hard disk space. - The graphical install seems broken I wont rant here, many others have reported this on other threads. - DNS I think it is un-neccessary to look up the host name of the system at install time. Home users like me do not use internal DNS servers, and if there is no interface connected to the lan at the time, it takes ages. - Offer the option to "Enable interface now" Often I want DHCP after the install but not at install, and so the NIC is not connected. It will hang trying to get a DHCP address. Can we ask if you want to enable the interface now (incase of net install). Good points: - Disk partitioning is quite good. Thanks for that. - You offer a text mode install I am not a fan of GUI installers, so I am pleased that you offer this option. Also it means a serial line can be used to install. Thankyou. Thanks for reading all that, and I hope it can help improve the installer. Best Regards and Keep up the great work Edd This message posted from opensolaris.org
