Hi Edd, Thanks for the comments. My comments/answers inline...
> 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. > Loading Java certainly takes time. That happens up front before any of the windows come up. The other bars are there for things like reading media, determining upgradeability. We could certainly do a better job of explaining what we are doing with the progress bars. > - 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. > Indeed it is difficult to customize. Lots of choices, lots of dependencies to work out. We are working on this with the new Solaris installer. Pointers to our new look and feel and project documentation at the end of this email. > - 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. > > It is big. And, yes it would be so much better if we had a small initial installation and then provided tools like apt-get. We know we need to do this and we are working toward this end. > - The graphical install seems broken > How so? The reason I ask is we are developing a new GUI installer and I want to understand what you think broken means. > 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. > > We are moving towards a non-networked configuration at install time and having the Network Automagic product automatically do the network configuration for us. See http://opensolaris.org/os/project/nwam/ for more details on this. > - 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. > > your welcome. > - 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 > > Thanks again for your input. Take a look at the new installer work we are doing here: http://opensolaris.org/os/project/caiman/ http://opensolaris.org/os/project/caiman/Dwarf/ We have a GUI demo which is really what the real UI will be when we are done. We have design documents and architecture documents that describe what direction we are moving towards. Your input on our futures would be appreciated. sarah
