Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Josh Boyer]

On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 6:41 AM, Richard W.M. Jones  wrote:
>
> I installed and played with Ubuntu 10.10 over the weekend (in a VM),
> and I have to say that their installer is very smooth indeed.  It's
> starting to make anaconda look distinctly clunky.
>
> Some of the things it does which are IMHO better:
>
>  - starts disk formatting / copying / installing in parallel
>   with asking user questions
>
>  - downloads updates in parallel too
>
>  - uses IP geolocation to guess the user's timezone and keyboard
>   settings (it's been 100% correct for me each time)
>
>  - suggests a username and hostname based on the user's real name
>   (Mac OS X's installer also does this -- it's a nice touch)
>
> This is in contrast to anaconda (certainly from the live CD install)
> which seems to be a usability no-go area.
>
> Thoughts?  Can we switch to their installer?

I would like to see you create a Fedora Remix spin with this change to
illustrate the benefits.  That way we can evaluate feasibility and
overall value add before we dive head first into it across the whole
project.

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 09:51:41AM -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
> I would like to see you create a Fedora Remix spin with this change to
> illustrate the benefits.  That way we can evaluate feasibility and
> overall value add before we dive head first into it across the whole
> project.

Proving what?  You can just imagine what a rebranded Ubuntu installer
that installed Fedora would look like.  My point anyway is that we
could look at Ubuntu for ideas, because the first point of contact
with users is now very smooth and (maybe) first impressions matter.

Rich.

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Mike McGrath]

On Mon, 11 Oct 2010, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 09:51:41AM -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
> > I would like to see you create a Fedora Remix spin with this change to
> > illustrate the benefits.  That way we can evaluate feasibility and
> > overall value add before we dive head first into it across the whole
> > project.
>
> Proving what?  You can just imagine what a rebranded Ubuntu installer
> that installed Fedora would look like.  My point anyway is that we
> could look at Ubuntu for ideas, because the first point of contact
> with users is now very smooth and (maybe) first impressions matter.
>

I think our pride problem will pretty much ensure that won't happen.
Afterall, we're the innovators, not them.  So if they did it, it's not
innovation.  :(

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Peter Lemenkov]

2010/10/11 Josh Boyer :

> I would like to see you create a Fedora Remix spin with this change to
> illustrate the benefits.  That way we can evaluate feasibility and
> overall value add before we dive head first into it across the whole
> project.

Useless waste of time. Just grab Ubuntu iso and see a stunning gap in
both technology and usability between anaconda and their own
installed.

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Peter Jones]

On 10/11/2010 10:21 AM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 09:51:41AM -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
>> I would like to see you create a Fedora Remix spin with this change to
>> illustrate the benefits.  That way we can evaluate feasibility and
>> overall value add before we dive head first into it across the whole
>> project.
> 
> Proving what?  You can just imagine what a rebranded Ubuntu installer
> that installed Fedora would look like.  My point anyway is that we
> could look at Ubuntu for ideas, because the first point of contact
> with users is now very smooth and (maybe) first impressions matter.

Do you seriously believe that we don't look at other OS installers,
including Ubuntu's, for ideas?

That's quite the naïvette you've cultivated there.

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Adam Jackson]

On Mon, 2010-10-11 at 15:21 +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 09:51:41AM -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
> > I would like to see you create a Fedora Remix spin with this change to
> > illustrate the benefits.  That way we can evaluate feasibility and
> > overall value add before we dive head first into it across the whole
> > project.
> 
> Proving what?  You can just imagine what a rebranded Ubuntu installer
> that installed Fedora would look like.  My point anyway is that we
> could look at Ubuntu for ideas, because the first point of contact
> with users is now very smooth and (maybe) first impressions matter.

We do.

Porting Fedora to the Ubuntu installer would be rather more work than
just adding those features to anaconda.  You might get a more favorable
reaction by phrasing your RFEs positively ("this is a neat thing that
these guys are doing, we should look into it") rather than negatively
("we should throw away what we're currently using and switch").

- ajax


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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Matthew Garrett]

On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 03:21:40PM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:

> Proving what?  You can just imagine what a rebranded Ubuntu installer
> that installed Fedora would look like.  My point anyway is that we
> could look at Ubuntu for ideas, because the first point of contact
> with users is now very smooth and (maybe) first impressions matter.

Maybe the virt-manager developers could spend some more time looking at 
vmware? This isn't a good way to have a worthwhile discussion. A 
description of the factors that you feel make Ubiquity better than 
Anaconda would be a much better way to handle this.

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Chris Lumens]

> Useless waste of time. Just grab Ubuntu iso and see a stunning gap in
> both technology and usability between anaconda and their own
> installed.

Does the Ubuntu installer support installing to iscsi?  Multipath?
CCISS?  Fully automated installation?  Install over VNC?  Installation
from NFS, ISO on NFS, ISO on HD?  Live images on USB keys?  Driver
disks?

Do you have any idea how much crap anaconda really does?

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Adam Miller]

On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 10:48:44AM -0400, Chris Lumens wrote:
> > Useless waste of time. Just grab Ubuntu iso and see a stunning gap in
> > both technology and usability between anaconda and their own
> > installed.
> 
> Does the Ubuntu installer support installing to iscsi?  Multipath?
> CCISS?  Fully automated installation?  Install over VNC?  Installation
> from NFS, ISO on NFS, ISO on HD?  Live images on USB keys?  Driver
> disks?
> 
> Do you have any idea how much crap anaconda really does?


A big epic +1

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 10:37:15AM -0400, Peter Jones wrote:
> On 10/11/2010 10:21 AM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 09:51:41AM -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
> >> I would like to see you create a Fedora Remix spin with this change to
> >> illustrate the benefits.  That way we can evaluate feasibility and
> >> overall value add before we dive head first into it across the whole
> >> project.
> > 
> > Proving what?  You can just imagine what a rebranded Ubuntu installer
> > that installed Fedora would look like.  My point anyway is that we
> > could look at Ubuntu for ideas, because the first point of contact
> > with users is now very smooth and (maybe) first impressions matter.
> 
> Do you seriously believe that we don't look at other OS installers,
> including Ubuntu's, for ideas?

That's not obvious to me, no.

Rich.

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Chris Lumens]

>  - downloads updates in parallel too

Package updates?

>  - uses IP geolocation to guess the user's timezone and keyboard
>settings (it's been 100% correct for me each time)

We can do this, it's just never really been brought up.  I'd like to
rework a lot of the l10n stuff anyway, there just never seems to be
time.

>  - suggests a username and hostname based on the user's real name
>(Mac OS X's installer also does this -- it's a nice touch)

If DNS knows a hostname, we will suggest that.  Of course it's not
foolproof.

mgracik is working on the username suggestion thing already.

> Thoughts?  Can we switch to their installer?

No.

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Gilboa Davara]

On Mon, 2010-10-11 at 11:41 +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> I installed and played with Ubuntu 10.10 over the weekend (in a VM),
> and I have to say that their installer is very smooth indeed.  It's
> starting to make anaconda look distinctly clunky.
> 
> Some of the things it does which are IMHO better:
> 
>  - starts disk formatting / copying / installing in parallel
>with asking user questions
> 
>  - downloads updates in parallel too
> 
>  - uses IP geolocation to guess the user's timezone and keyboard
>settings (it's been 100% correct for me each time)
> 
>  - suggests a username and hostname based on the user's real name
>(Mac OS X's installer also does this -- it's a nice touch)
> 
> This is in contrast to anaconda (certainly from the live CD install)
> which seems to be a usability no-go area.
> 
> Thoughts?  Can we switch to their installer?
> 
> Rich.
> 

Comparing the Ubuntu 10.04 DVD installer (which I use a couple of weeks
ago) to Fedora 13 DVD installer is like comparing the Cessna to a Boeing
747.
Sure, both can accomplish the same task. Read: transporting people from
one airport to another, but lets see you try transporting 400 peoples
from London to NY using a Cessna... 

The same logic applies to the Ubuntu installer: As long as you require a
fairly basic -desktop- configuration (Read: No fancy storage, no LVM, no
fancy setup source [nfs, dvd, http], -very- basic encryption, standard
software set and repository selection, etc), the Ubuntu installer is a
great tool, but once you need something complex, you're screwed.

- Gilboa

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Michał Piotrowski]

2010/10/11 Richard W.M. Jones :
>
> I installed and played with Ubuntu 10.10 over the weekend (in a VM),
> and I have to say that their installer is very smooth indeed.  It's
> starting to make anaconda look distinctly clunky.
>
> Some of the things it does which are IMHO better:
>
>  - starts disk formatting / copying / installing in parallel
>   with asking user questions
>
>  - downloads updates in parallel too
>
>  - uses IP geolocation to guess the user's timezone and keyboard
>   settings (it's been 100% correct for me each time)
>
>  - suggests a username and hostname based on the user's real name
>   (Mac OS X's installer also does this -- it's a nice touch)
>
> This is in contrast to anaconda (certainly from the live CD install)
> which seems to be a usability no-go area.
>
> Thoughts?

Which of these functions can not be implemented in anaconda?

> Can we switch to their installer?

Does it support text based minimal install?

>
> Rich.
>

Regards,
Michal
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Matthew Garrett]

On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 05:53:20PM +0200, Michał Piotrowski wrote:

> Does it support text based minimal install?

debian-installer? Yes.

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Jon Masters]

On Mon, 2010-10-11 at 17:39 +0200, Gilboa Davara wrote:

> Comparing the Ubuntu 10.04 DVD installer (which I use a couple of weeks
> ago) to Fedora 13 DVD installer is like comparing the Cessna to a Boeing
> 747.
> Sure, both can accomplish the same task. Read: transporting people from
> one airport to another, but lets see you try transporting 400 peoples
> from London to NY using a Cessna... 
> 
> The same logic applies to the Ubuntu installer: As long as you require a
> fairly basic -desktop- configuration (Read: No fancy storage, no LVM, no
> fancy setup source [nfs, dvd, http], -very- basic encryption, standard
> software set and repository selection, etc), the Ubuntu installer is a
> great tool, but once you need something complex, you're screwed.

That's all true. I've found the Ubuntu installer looks /very/ polished
and nice for very common install cases, but I always use LVM on every
install that I do, and last time I did a VM install of Ubuntu, I had to
switch to a VT and get LVM sorted on the command line. Not super user
friendly as compared with Anaconda. Other installers were even more of a
joke doing this stuff. Tried doing LVM on Gentoo? :) Things like LVM and
VNC do really matter, and not just for "Enterprise" users. You don't
need to use LVM w/wo RAID, you can just do bare partitions if you don't
care about being able to do anything useful with your disks at all :)

Jon.


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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[John Reiser]

On 10/11/2010 03:41 AM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:

> Some of the things [Ubuntu 10.10 installer] does which are IMHO better:
> 
>  - starts disk formatting / copying / installing in parallel
>with asking user questions
> 
>  - downloads updates in parallel too

What was the wall-clock duration from "Go!" to done?
Should be about 140 seconds for a 32X CD-ROM: (700MB / 5MB/s).
{Fetch_from_media_or_download, and uncompress_package_to_pieces_in_RAMfs}
parallelizes almost perfectly with package install, even with only one CPU.

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Liang Suilong]

I think anaconda is better than ubuntu installer.

Ubuntu installer does not support LVM and RAID. I need these features.

Anaconda does not easily support upgrading from internet. It is quite
regretful.

On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 12:14 AM, John Reiser  wrote:

> On 10/11/2010 03:41 AM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>
> > Some of the things [Ubuntu 10.10 installer] does which are IMHO better:
> >
> >  - starts disk formatting / copying / installing in parallel
> >with asking user questions
> >
> >  - downloads updates in parallel too
>
> What was the wall-clock duration from "Go!" to done?
> Should be about 140 seconds for a 32X CD-ROM: (700MB / 5MB/s).
> {Fetch_from_media_or_download, and uncompress_package_to_pieces_in_RAMfs}
> parallelizes almost perfectly with package install, even with only one CPU.
>
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Matthias Clasen]

On Mon, 2010-10-11 at 10:48 -0400, Chris Lumens wrote:
> > Useless waste of time. Just grab Ubuntu iso and see a stunning gap in
> > both technology and usability between anaconda and their own
> > installed.
> 
> Does the Ubuntu installer support installing to iscsi?  Multipath?
> CCISS?  Fully automated installation?  Install over VNC?  Installation
> from NFS, ISO on NFS, ISO on HD?  Live images on USB keys?  Driver
> disks?
> 
> Do you have any idea how much crap anaconda really does?

That is certainly a big part of the problem. Anaconda does a _ton_ of
crap that only very few users care about. And keeping all these minority
features from falling apart is leaving you no time to polish the user
experience for the large majority of users.

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Bill Nottingham]

Matthias Clasen (mcla...@redhat.com) said: 
> That is certainly a big part of the problem. Anaconda does a _ton_ of
> crap that only very few users care about. And keeping all these minority
> features from falling apart is leaving you no time to polish the user
> experience for the large majority of users.

Correct. And any time it's suggested that certain parts of that crap
be removed to streamline things, people come screaming. (The discussion
about pruning the install methods is the one that comes to mind...
mm, nfsiso and hard drive installs.)

Bill
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Bill Nottingham]

Chris Lumens (clum...@redhat.com) said: 
> >  - downloads updates in parallel too
> 
> Package updates?

1) Given that it's using yum, downloading multiple things in parallel
would need to be fixed there.
2) If it means downloading packages in the background while it does
other tasks, given that package selection is the final task in the
current workflow, it would require reordering the workflow to be
beneficial. (Which becomes a memory usage tradeoff.)

Bill
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[James Laska]

On Mon, 2010-10-11 at 13:16 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Matthias Clasen (mcla...@redhat.com) said: 
> > That is certainly a big part of the problem. Anaconda does a _ton_ of
> > crap that only very few users care about. And keeping all these minority
> > features from falling apart is leaving you no time to polish the user
> > experience for the large majority of users.
> 
> Correct. And any time it's suggested that certain parts of that crap
> be removed to streamline things, people come screaming. (The discussion
> about pruning the install methods is the one that comes to mind...
> mm, nfsiso and hard drive installs.)

The permutations are exhaustive.

https://www.redhat.com/archives/anaconda-devel-list/2010-May/msg00305.html

Thanks,
James


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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Jos Vos]

On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 01:07:26PM -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:

> That is certainly a big part of the problem. Anaconda does a _ton_ of
> crap that only very few users care about. And keeping all these minority
> features from falling apart is leaving you no time to polish the user
> experience for the large majority of users.

I do not see why we should remove functionality (and almost everything
is there for a good reason) to "polish the user experience".  I do not
even see that the latter is needed (the things mentioned in the initial
mail we really minor things and/or probably quite easy to add), but
that's maybe my fault as a hard-core UNIX guy...

I recently had to install a SLES system for some experimental reason
and ended up with a screwed-up system (read: MBR), probably because
the user experience was so polished that it didn't want to ask me
the things it *should* have asked :(.

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 11:41:13 +0100,
  "Richard W.M. Jones"  wrote:
> 
> Some of the things it does which are IMHO better:
> 
>  - starts disk formatting / copying / installing in parallel
>with asking user questions

I think that is a misfeature. I don't want anything irreversible to be done
until I say go.
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Bruno Wolff III  said:
> On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 11:41:13 +0100,
>   "Richard W.M. Jones"  wrote:
> > 
> > Some of the things it does which are IMHO better:
> > 
> >  - starts disk formatting / copying / installing in parallel
> >with asking user questions
> 
> I think that is a misfeature. I don't want anything irreversible to be done
> until I say go.

You know that Fedora has done partitioning/mkfs about halfway through
the install for a while now, right?  I don't see why there would be a
problem with letting that run in the background while continuing through
the questions.
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Gilboa Davara]

On Mon, 2010-10-11 at 12:09 -0400, Jon Masters wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-10-11 at 17:39 +0200, Gilboa Davara wrote:
> 
> > Comparing the Ubuntu 10.04 DVD installer (which I use a couple of weeks
> > ago) to Fedora 13 DVD installer is like comparing the Cessna to a Boeing
> > 747.
> > Sure, both can accomplish the same task. Read: transporting people from
> > one airport to another, but lets see you try transporting 400 peoples
> > from London to NY using a Cessna... 
> > 
> > The same logic applies to the Ubuntu installer: As long as you require a
> > fairly basic -desktop- configuration (Read: No fancy storage, no LVM, no
> > fancy setup source [nfs, dvd, http], -very- basic encryption, standard
> > software set and repository selection, etc), the Ubuntu installer is a
> > great tool, but once you need something complex, you're screwed.
> 
> That's all true. I've found the Ubuntu installer looks /very/ polished
> and nice for very common install cases, but I always use LVM on every
> install that I do, and last time I did a VM install of Ubuntu, I had to
> switch to a VT and get LVM sorted on the command line. Not super user
> friendly as compared with Anaconda. Other installers were even more of a
> joke doing this stuff. Tried doing LVM on Gentoo? :) Things like LVM and
> VNC do really matter, and not just for "Enterprise" users. You don't
> need to use LVM w/wo RAID, you can just do bare partitions if you don't
> care about being able to do anything useful with your disks at all :)

Amen to that.
Given the absurdly cheap price of HD these days, I usually opt for LVM
over software RAID1 / RAID5 on each and every workstation machine I
install.
Achieving the same using the Ubuntu installer would have required a lot
of manual mdadm and lvm pv/vg/lv** commands. (Let alone their basic disk
partitioning tool)

... In their race for Joe-six-pack and Apple like polish, Ubuntu gave up
on many Linux core capabilities. Hopefully Fedora will -not- follow
suite.

- Gilboa

- Gilboa

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 12:44:49 -0500,
  Chris Adams  wrote:
> > 
> > I think that is a misfeature. I don't want anything irreversible to be done
> > until I say go.
> 
> You know that Fedora has done partitioning/mkfs about halfway through
> the install for a while now, right?  I don't see why there would be a
> problem with letting that run in the background while continuing through
> the questions.

I forget which stuff gets done afterwards, since I haven't done a fresh install
for a while now. (I mostly do yum upgrades and play with live USB images.)
But I do remember a clear no/no go point where disk drive file systems get
formatted. Depending on the file systems being used that can take a little
bit of time to complete, but is short compared to the rest of the install.
I tend to do install all of the games, so my installs may take longer than
average. I also always do custom disk layouts, so I might see things a bit
different from people that don't do that.
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[seth vidal]

On Mon, 2010-10-11 at 13:18 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Chris Lumens (clum...@redhat.com) said: 
> > >  - downloads updates in parallel too
> > 
> > Package updates?
> 
> 1) Given that it's using yum, downloading multiple things in parallel
> would need to be fixed there.


We have an open rfe for related things - we're hoping to combine two
rfe's into one:

1. have the pkg/metadata downloads run in a different process in a
different context  - for selinux
2. have each repo have its own downloader process which can handle
however many pkgs/metadata at a time that downloader process can cope
with.

If someone wants to work on that come by #yum

-sv

 

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Jon Masters]

On Mon, 2010-10-11 at 12:51 -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 12:44:49 -0500,
>   Chris Adams  wrote:
> > > 
> > > I think that is a misfeature. I don't want anything irreversible to be 
> > > done
> > > until I say go.
> > 
> > You know that Fedora has done partitioning/mkfs about halfway through
> > the install for a while now, right?  I don't see why there would be a
> > problem with letting that run in the background while continuing through
> > the questions.
> 
> I forget which stuff gets done afterwards, since I haven't done a fresh 
> install
> for a while now. (I mostly do yum upgrades and play with live USB images.)
> But I do remember a clear no/no go point where disk drive file systems get
> formatted. Depending on the file systems being used that can take a little
> bit of time to complete, but is short compared to the rest of the install.
> I tend to do install all of the games, so my installs may take longer than
> average. I also always do custom disk layouts, so I might see things a bit
> different from people that don't do that.

In fairness to Rich, I think it's easy to get carried away with how
technicall better we are, but we shouldn't totally devalue the impact of
the shiny gloss on some users, reviews, and on general perception.

I used to be technical editor for a Linux magazine and I've read more
than my fair share of reviews of distributions over the years (and
written some too, it has to be admitted). Here's how it seems to go all
too often in general: 10% background, 30-40% installation, 20% what got
installed, then everything else. It's because reviewers are busy, and
don't have time to know a community - so first impressions count. And
Ubuntu is "known to be cool", so they get extra points in any case.

Sadly enough, this means that a shiny Ubuntu installer is to the whole
distribution what GNOME shell is to the GNOME project. It doesn't matter
if you've got a lot of bells and whistles underneath, or what you can
do, if you don't look pretty while you do it. It's just the reality. I
would venture that one of the reasons Rich sent his mail originally is
that he's aware of this mentality and pointing out its effects.

Jon.


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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Lars Seipel]

On Monday 11 October 2010 12:41:13 Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> This is in contrast to anaconda (certainly from the live CD install)
> which seems to be a usability no-go area.
> 
> Thoughts?  Can we switch to their installer?
> 
> Rich.

It may be nice usability-wise but it lacks support for LVM2, LUKS disk 
encryption and practically everything more advanced. It can't be automated 
using some equivalent to kickstart and it fails at all the stuff Anaconda 
subsumes unter "advanced storage devices". You can't even do the install from 
some remote place without setting anything up by hand. Ubuntu users requiring 
more than these very basic features have to go for the Debian text mode 
installer Ubuntu ships on their alternate media. 

Striving for usability and pleasantness for the untechnical users certainly is 
a good thing. It gets problematic when you choose to make things technically 
inferior just to please those kind of users.

So I don't think it's a good idea to switch to this, even if it was trivially 
possible to use with Fedora. But there's nothing preventing us to take the 
ubiquity features we enjoy most and enable Anaconda to do something similar.

Lars.
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Farkas Levente]

On 10/11/2010 06:09 PM, Jon Masters wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-10-11 at 17:39 +0200, Gilboa Davara wrote:
> 
>> Comparing the Ubuntu 10.04 DVD installer (which I use a couple of weeks
>> ago) to Fedora 13 DVD installer is like comparing the Cessna to a Boeing
>> 747.
>> Sure, both can accomplish the same task. Read: transporting people from
>> one airport to another, but lets see you try transporting 400 peoples
>> from London to NY using a Cessna... 
>>
>> The same logic applies to the Ubuntu installer: As long as you require a
>> fairly basic -desktop- configuration (Read: No fancy storage, no LVM, no
>> fancy setup source [nfs, dvd, http], -very- basic encryption, standard
>> software set and repository selection, etc), the Ubuntu installer is a
>> great tool, but once you need something complex, you're screwed.
> 
> That's all true. I've found the Ubuntu installer looks /very/ polished
> and nice for very common install cases, but I always use LVM on every
> install that I do, and last time I did a VM install of Ubuntu, I had to
> switch to a VT and get LVM sorted on the command line. Not super user
> friendly as compared with Anaconda. Other installers were even more of a
> joke doing this stuff. Tried doing LVM on Gentoo? :) Things like LVM and
> VNC do really matter, and not just for "Enterprise" users. You don't
> need to use LVM w/wo RAID, you can just do bare partitions if you don't
> care about being able to do anything useful with your disks at all :)

imho, the never drop any feature since raid, lvm, iscsi are important
(what's more i use them:-), BUT most user don't ie. 80% of the users
never use them.
it can be an "advanced" installer option for us, and a "basic" for
average user.
the other point of richards is what the whole fedora community and
redhat should have to understand: "most users like ubuntu rather then
fedora/redhat". why? because:
- it's looks better. every component looks better, installer, default
gnome themes etc. we can make a long discussion about which is better
but our opinion simple do not count. better is what most user like. period.
- it's easier to use. for average user it's the most important thing. we
can always have an advance and basic settings.

wouldn't be useful to ask users which they like and try to make
fedora/redhat's component better?

just my 2c.

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Emmanuel Seyman]

* Matthew Garrett [11/10/2010 19:57] :
>
> debian-installer? Yes.

Shipping 2 different installers is a recipe for disaster from a user and
QA perspective.Choose one between Ubiquity, Debian-installer and Anaconda.

Emmanuel

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Chris Lumens]

> Shipping 2 different installers is a recipe for disaster from a user and
> QA perspective.Choose one between Ubiquity, Debian-installer and Anaconda.

We only ship one installer, and that is anaconda.  I suppose you could
argue over whether livecd is its own thing or not, but that's a nitpicky
detail.

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Manuel Wolfshant]

On 10/11/2010 08:51 PM, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 12:44:49 -0500,
>   Chris Adams  wrote:
>   
>>> I think that is a misfeature. I don't want anything irreversible to be done
>>> until I say go.
>>>   
>> You know that Fedora has done partitioning/mkfs about halfway through
>> the install for a while now, right?  I don't see why there would be a
>> problem with letting that run in the background while continuing through
>> the questions.
>> 
>
> I forget which stuff gets done afterwards, since I haven't done a fresh 
> install
> for a while now. (I mostly do yum upgrades and play with live USB images.)
> But I do remember a clear no/no go point where disk drive file systems get
> formatted. Depending on the file systems being used that can take a little
> bit of time to complete, but is short compared to the rest of the install.
>   
Actually formatting a large partition ( and >=1 TB disks are becoming 
more and more frequent) DOES take enough time to go boil a coffee.

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Lars Seipel]

On Monday 11 October 2010 23:44:01 Farkas Levente wrote:
> but our opinion simple do not count. better is what most user like. period.

We all know that's not true. In an ideal world the best things would also be 
those with the most success. Sadly, in reality this doesn't apply. Just look 
what the most popular newspapers are. Do you really want to tell me these are 
the ones offering the highest quality journalism available? At least where I 
live, the most popular newspapers are also those most full of crap. In the 
best case they just write trivial nonsense, whereas most of the time they use 
their popularity to push their own agenda. Nevertheless they sell most of the 
copies, whereas many papers used to be known for their high quality are 
struggling for their existence. No, in reality there is not always a 
correlation between popularity and quality.

Obviously, this doesn't mean that popularity is bad. But when the price we 
have to pay for being popular is heavy (i.e. doing something that makes Fedora 
inferior from a technical point of view)  this should be well considered.

Speaking frankly, I want to help making an operating system that is excellent 
in technical terms. Popularity is certainly nice to have, but when it requires 
actions that are contrary to technical excellence it clearly comes second. I 
don't want to do anything against better judgement. As long as Fedora doesn't 
depend on selling as much copies as possible I think that's an reasonable 
approach. But that's just my humble opinion. Everybody is free to have their 
own.

Lars.
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Matthew Garrett]

On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 12:12:35AM +0200, Emmanuel Seyman wrote:
> * Matthew Garrett [11/10/2010 19:57] :
> >
> > debian-installer? Yes.
> 
> Shipping 2 different installers is a recipe for disaster from a user and
> QA perspective.Choose one between Ubiquity, Debian-installer and Anaconda.

Ubiquity is a graphical interface built on top of the debian-installer 
framework.

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2010-10-11 at 13:16 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Matthias Clasen (mcla...@redhat.com) said: 
> > That is certainly a big part of the problem. Anaconda does a _ton_ of
> > crap that only very few users care about. And keeping all these minority
> > features from falling apart is leaving you no time to polish the user
> > experience for the large majority of users.
> 
> Correct. And any time it's suggested that certain parts of that crap
> be removed to streamline things, people come screaming. (The discussion
> about pruning the install methods is the one that comes to mind...
> mm, nfsiso and hard drive installs.)

...and all the people who are complaining about how the text install has
been streamlined...
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2010-10-11 at 13:18 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Chris Lumens (clum...@redhat.com) said: 
> > >  - downloads updates in parallel too
> > 
> > Package updates?
> 
> 1) Given that it's using yum, downloading multiple things in parallel
> would need to be fixed there.
> 2) If it means downloading packages in the background while it does
> other tasks, given that package selection is the final task in the
> current workflow, it would require reordering the workflow to be
> beneficial. (Which becomes a memory usage tradeoff.)

I believe the Ubuntu installer under discussion is the live installer.
Like Fedora, there is no package selection involved there. Ubuntu gains
considerable simplicity by having a separate installer app for live
images and making that its default installer - I'm no expert, but I
think the 'advanced' installer you can use for network installs and
custom package selection and LVM and RAID and all that stuff is
essentially Debian's installer, and is a completely different experience
to the Ubuntu installer.

So, we could follow this same path and make an anaconda-live which would
be a considerably simplified subset of anaconda and could gain in
parallelization and simplification and stuff, but we'd be duplicating a
lot of effort then and we'd have no handy 'upstream' installer to fall
back on for more complex cases, as Ubuntu does.
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2010-10-11 at 15:44 -0400, Jon Masters wrote:
> Sadly enough, this means that a shiny Ubuntu installer is to the whole
> distribution what GNOME shell is to the GNOME project. It doesn't matter
> if you've got a lot of bells and whistles underneath, or what you can
> do, if you don't look pretty while you do it. It's just the reality. I
> would venture that one of the reasons Rich sent his mail originally is
> that he's aware of this mentality and pointing out its effects.

You forgot to qualify the above paragraph: it doesn't matter _to a
distribution reviewer_. We aren't necessarily making Fedora for
distribution reviewers.
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Gilboa Davara]

> 
> the other point of richards is what the whole fedora community and
> redhat should have to understand: "most users like ubuntu rather then
> fedora/redhat". why? because:
> -... better is what most user like. period.

Following your simplistic logic, we should mimic the Windows Vista/7 UAC
(Even if it's insecure by design) or even consider running as root by
default, why?
- Usage-wise, Windows XP is the leading OS in the world, and 99% of all
Windows XP users are running as administrator. (Most don't even bother
to use password protected administrator-capable user accounts)
- Windows 7 will most likely overtake Windows XP in 2-3 years and it's
using UAC by default.

I assume that I do really need point out -why- this logic is flawed...
Different operating system target different user bases and usage cases.
Different Linux distributions target different user bases and usage
cases.

At least the last time I checked, Fedora -didn't- target Joe-six-pack as
its primary target user base (Let alone RHEL, which shares the same
Anaconda code).

- Gilboa


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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Gerd Hoffmann]

On 10/11/10 19:31, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 11:41:13 +0100,
>"Richard W.M. Jones"  wrote:
>>
>> Some of the things it does which are IMHO better:
>>
>>   - starts disk formatting / copying / installing in parallel
>> with asking user questions
>
> I think that is a misfeature. I don't want anything irreversible to be done
> until I say go.

I always liked the way suse does the install.  It comes up with a 
*single* overview screen showing *everything* it suggests to do 
(partitioning, packages to install, some basic settings, ...).  Then you 
can go and change stuff if you want, and after changing settings it goes 
back to the overview screen, showing what it would do now after applying 
your changes. This way you are not bothered with lots of interactive 
questions but still have the option to change everything as you like if 
you want.  When you are happy with everything you say 'go!' and it goes. 
It doesn't touch your hard disk before.

Anaconda goes though everything step-by-step instead, asking one 
question after another, doing some work inbetween (partitining), asking 
more questions (packages to install) ...

Dunno how hard it would be to change anaconda to have such an overview 
screen.  Maybe it isn't *that* hard after all as we have kickstart.  So 
for a interactive install anaconda could collect all info from the user, 
compile a kickstart file from that, then feed the install machinery with 
the just-generated kickstart file.

Anaconda can try to figure reasonable defaults.  Using geoip. By 
inspecting the hardware.  Have 'klick here to change' buttons to change 
things, which can probably handled by the existing screens for timezone 
/ keyboard / ... selection.  Maybe even reading stuff from a kickstart 
file and present it in the overview, so you could stick your favorite 
non-default settings there.

cheers
   Gerd
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Gerd Hoffmann]

   Hi,

> Striving for usability and pleasantness for the untechnical users certainly is
> a good thing. It gets problematic when you choose to make things technically
> inferior just to please those kind of users.

We don't have to make things inferior to improve usability.  To stick 
with the "advanved storage" example:  IMHO the selection screen between 
basic and advanced storage is confusing and superfluous.  First it 
should probably be named "local storage" and "SAN storage".  Second 
anaconda can default to local storage if a local disk is present (option 
to add SAN storage needs to be there of course).  If no local disk is 
present it can go straight to SAN setup.  One screen and one mouse click 
less for most of the users.

cheers,
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Lun 11 octobre 2010 23:44, Farkas Levente a écrit :

> imho, the never drop any feature since raid, lvm, iscsi are important
> (what's more i use them:-), BUT most user don't ie. 80% of the users
> never use them.

If you fail one way or another 20% of users you fail period. That's not an
acceptable failure rate for something like the installer everyone has to use
at a time.

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Farkas Levente]

On 10/12/2010 09:53 AM, Gilboa Davara wrote:
> 
>>
>> the other point of richards is what the whole fedora community and
>> redhat should have to understand: "most users like ubuntu rather then
>> fedora/redhat". why? because:
>> -... better is what most user like. period.
> 
> Following your simplistic logic, we should mimic the Windows Vista/7 UAC
> (Even if it's insecure by design) or even consider running as root by
> default, why?

with "better" i simple refer here to the style (ie. which one looks
better) it's nothing to do functionality or security. of course if you
wouldn't like to understand that's a different story.

ps. and yes most of the case windows and windows apps looks better the
linux and we'd have to learn a lot from them.

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Dennis Jacobfeuerborn]

On 10/12/2010 10:28 AM, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
> Hi,
>
>> Striving for usability and pleasantness for the untechnical users certainly 
>> is
>> a good thing. It gets problematic when you choose to make things technically
>> inferior just to please those kind of users.
>
> We don't have to make things inferior to improve usability.  To stick
> with the "advanved storage" example:  IMHO the selection screen between
> basic and advanced storage is confusing and superfluous.  First it
> should probably be named "local storage" and "SAN storage".  Second
> anaconda can default to local storage if a local disk is present (option
> to add SAN storage needs to be there of course).  If no local disk is
> present it can go straight to SAN setup.  One screen and one mouse click
> less for most of the users.

If you want to appeal to the same audience Ubuntu is going for then you 
have to remove choice. The whole storage bit needs to be completely removed 
or at least stripped down. "advanced storage" certainly has to disappear 
completely.
The only way to accomplish this without actually removing the features is 
to have two anaconda modes one for easy desktop installation and one full 
featured mode. This mode should be chosen not by the user but by the spin 
e.g. the desktop spin would use the easy mode and the server or workstation 
spins would use the full featured one.

You cannot make two distinct target audiences happy with one workflow 
especially if one of those groups requires a limitation of choice.

Regards,
   Dennis
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 10/12/2010 02:16 PM, Dennis Jacobfeuerborn wrote:
> On 10/12/2010 10:28 AM, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
>>  Hi,
>>
>>> Striving for usability and pleasantness for the untechnical users certainly 
>>> is
>>> a good thing. It gets problematic when you choose to make things technically
>>> inferior just to please those kind of users.
>>
>> We don't have to make things inferior to improve usability.  To stick
>> with the "advanved storage" example:  IMHO the selection screen between
>> basic and advanced storage is confusing and superfluous.  First it
>> should probably be named "local storage" and "SAN storage".  Second
>> anaconda can default to local storage if a local disk is present (option
>> to add SAN storage needs to be there of course).  If no local disk is
>> present it can go straight to SAN setup.  One screen and one mouse click
>> less for most of the users.
>
> If you want to appeal to the same audience Ubuntu is going for then you
> have to remove choice.

Why? All that would be required would be to move it out of this 
audience's way (the "defaults").

As Gerd mentioned in another mail, SUSE's installer seems interesting 
wrt. this. Its "defaults" cater the demands of "uneducated desktop 
installers", while still allows many kinds of complex setups outside of 
the "defaults" in "advanced menus".

Apart of what Gerd already said, SUSE's installer also comes with clever 
GUI-implementation details, which I think might be worth a look into for 
the anaconda folks ;)

Ralf

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Jean-Francois Saucier]

On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 8:16 AM, Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
 wrote:
> On 10/12/2010 10:28 AM, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
>>     Hi,
>>
>>> Striving for usability and pleasantness for the untechnical users certainly 
>>> is
>>> a good thing. It gets problematic when you choose to make things technically
>>> inferior just to please those kind of users.
>>
>> We don't have to make things inferior to improve usability.  To stick
>> with the "advanved storage" example:  IMHO the selection screen between
>> basic and advanced storage is confusing and superfluous.  First it
>> should probably be named "local storage" and "SAN storage".  Second
>> anaconda can default to local storage if a local disk is present (option
>> to add SAN storage needs to be there of course).  If no local disk is
>> present it can go straight to SAN setup.  One screen and one mouse click
>> less for most of the users.
>
> If you want to appeal to the same audience Ubuntu is going for then you
> have to remove choice. The whole storage bit needs to be completely removed
> or at least stripped down. "advanced storage" certainly has to disappear
> completely.
> The only way to accomplish this without actually removing the features is
> to have two anaconda modes one for easy desktop installation and one full
> featured mode. This mode should be chosen not by the user but by the spin
> e.g. the desktop spin would use the easy mode and the server or workstation
> spins would use the full featured one.
>
> You cannot make two distinct target audiences happy with one workflow
> especially if one of those groups requires a limitation of choice.
>
> Regards,
>   Dennis
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>

Why this mode could not be selected by the user?

I would say that the default mode be more like the Ubuntu installer
and give the choice of an advanced mode like the current one. When you
boot the CD/DVD, you could easily add the new choice in the list
(Install, Install (advanced features), Boot from hard drive, etc).


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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Dennis Jacobfeuerborn]

On 10/12/2010 02:52 PM, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On 10/12/2010 02:16 PM, Dennis Jacobfeuerborn wrote:
>> On 10/12/2010 10:28 AM, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
>>>   Hi,
>>>
 Striving for usability and pleasantness for the untechnical users 
 certainly is
 a good thing. It gets problematic when you choose to make things 
 technically
 inferior just to please those kind of users.
>>>
>>> We don't have to make things inferior to improve usability.  To stick
>>> with the "advanved storage" example:  IMHO the selection screen between
>>> basic and advanced storage is confusing and superfluous.  First it
>>> should probably be named "local storage" and "SAN storage".  Second
>>> anaconda can default to local storage if a local disk is present (option
>>> to add SAN storage needs to be there of course).  If no local disk is
>>> present it can go straight to SAN setup.  One screen and one mouse click
>>> less for most of the users.
>>
>> If you want to appeal to the same audience Ubuntu is going for then you
>> have to remove choice.
>
> Why? All that would be required would be to move it out of this
> audience's way (the "defaults").

Now we are really talking semantics. The point is that users should not be 
confronted with choices they don't really need to make or they don't 
understand.

> As Gerd mentioned in another mail, SUSE's installer seems interesting
> wrt. this. Its "defaults" cater the demands of "uneducated desktop
> installers", while still allows many kinds of complex setups outside of
> the "defaults" in "advanced menus".

As long as most of these defaults and menus are not displayed initially 
that would probably be fine.
The problem here is that every time you present the user with data dumps 
(e.g. lists of defaults) or menus you create a cognitive hurdle where the 
user wonders what he's supposed to do or gets worried that he breaks 
something. Minimizing that is really key to creating a streamlined 
installation interface.

The second aspect is that you want to talk to the user in terms of his 
"problem" and not in terms of the underlying technology. For example a user 
wants to either replace the current System completely or install the 
distribution into free space on his HD and but into either the old or the 
new installed system. The user doesn't care at all about "partitions", 
"LVM" or "mountpoints". This is different from the more apt user who wants 
to actually have control over these details (where exactly to put 
partition(s) on the disk for example).

The issue here is that keeping these advanced features available could have 
a negative impact on the "easy-mode" experience. If you manage to prevent 
that from happening than more power to you but if not then creating two 
distinct workflows is really the only option.

Regards,
   Dennis
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Chris Lumens]

> Anaconda goes though everything step-by-step instead, asking one 
> question after another, doing some work inbetween (partitining), asking 
> more questions (packages to install) ...

We have worked a little to reduce this over time, too.  If you remember
we used to have a confirmation screen after picking your packages.  The
result of that was that many people would click Next, go away to do
something thinking packages were being installed, then come back much
later only to see that the confirmation screen is still there.

But yes, there is always more to do.

> Dunno how hard it would be to change anaconda to have such an overview 
> screen.  Maybe it isn't *that* hard after all as we have kickstart.  So 
> for a interactive install anaconda could collect all info from the user, 
> compile a kickstart file from that, then feed the install machinery with 
> the just-generated kickstart file.

We have talked about doing just this.  I don't imagine it's terribly
difficuly, with the exception of storage.

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Dennis Jacobfeuerborn]

On 10/12/2010 02:57 PM, Jean-Francois Saucier wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 8:16 AM, Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
>   wrote:
>> On 10/12/2010 10:28 AM, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
>>>  Hi,
>>>
 Striving for usability and pleasantness for the untechnical users 
 certainly is
 a good thing. It gets problematic when you choose to make things 
 technically
 inferior just to please those kind of users.
>>>
>>> We don't have to make things inferior to improve usability.  To stick
>>> with the "advanved storage" example:  IMHO the selection screen between
>>> basic and advanced storage is confusing and superfluous.  First it
>>> should probably be named "local storage" and "SAN storage".  Second
>>> anaconda can default to local storage if a local disk is present (option
>>> to add SAN storage needs to be there of course).  If no local disk is
>>> present it can go straight to SAN setup.  One screen and one mouse click
>>> less for most of the users.
>>
>> If you want to appeal to the same audience Ubuntu is going for then you
>> have to remove choice. The whole storage bit needs to be completely removed
>> or at least stripped down. "advanced storage" certainly has to disappear
>> completely.
>> The only way to accomplish this without actually removing the features is
>> to have two anaconda modes one for easy desktop installation and one full
>> featured mode. This mode should be chosen not by the user but by the spin
>> e.g. the desktop spin would use the easy mode and the server or workstation
>> spins would use the full featured one.
>>
>> You cannot make two distinct target audiences happy with one workflow
>> especially if one of those groups requires a limitation of choice.
>>
>> Regards,
>>Dennis
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>>
>
> Why this mode could not be selected by the user?
>
> I would say that the default mode be more like the Ubuntu installer
> and give the choice of an advanced mode like the current one. When you
> boot the CD/DVD, you could easily add the new choice in the list
> (Install, Install (advanced features), Boot from hard drive, etc).
>

That would certainly be an option. The key point here is that you need a 
way to provide a distinct experience for regular users that is not hampered 
by considerations for more advanced ones. That's one of the things that 
Ubuntu does differently than Fedora in my opinion although with the latest 
ideas for a simplified package manager Fedora is certainly heading in the 
right direction.

Let me clarify my position: I have no problem with with providing advanced 
features but in order to create a truly polished experience for regular 
users you need to be able to truly focus on them. If every time you think 
"If we did X, Y and Z we could make the lives of users a lot easier" you 
have to immediately go to "but because of the advanced audience we can't do 
X and Y and we can only do an awkward implementation of Z" than you will 
not be able to create a truly exceptional experience.

Regards,
   Dennis
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Rudolf Kastl]

2010/10/11 Gilboa Davara :
> On Mon, 2010-10-11 at 12:09 -0400, Jon Masters wrote:
>> On Mon, 2010-10-11 at 17:39 +0200, Gilboa Davara wrote:
>>
>> > Comparing the Ubuntu 10.04 DVD installer (which I use a couple of weeks
>> > ago) to Fedora 13 DVD installer is like comparing the Cessna to a Boeing
>> > 747.
>> > Sure, both can accomplish the same task. Read: transporting people from
>> > one airport to another, but lets see you try transporting 400 peoples
>> > from London to NY using a Cessna...
>> >
>> > The same logic applies to the Ubuntu installer: As long as you require a
>> > fairly basic -desktop- configuration (Read: No fancy storage, no LVM, no
>> > fancy setup source [nfs, dvd, http], -very- basic encryption, standard
>> > software set and repository selection, etc), the Ubuntu installer is a
>> > great tool, but once you need something complex, you're screwed.
>>
>> That's all true. I've found the Ubuntu installer looks /very/ polished
>> and nice for very common install cases, but I always use LVM on every
>> install that I do, and last time I did a VM install of Ubuntu, I had to
>> switch to a VT and get LVM sorted on the command line. Not super user
>> friendly as compared with Anaconda. Other installers were even more of a
>> joke doing this stuff. Tried doing LVM on Gentoo? :) Things like LVM and
>> VNC do really matter, and not just for "Enterprise" users. You don't
>> need to use LVM w/wo RAID, you can just do bare partitions if you don't
>> care about being able to do anything useful with your disks at all :)
>
> Amen to that.
> Given the absurdly cheap price of HD these days, I usually opt for LVM
> over software RAID1 / RAID5 on each and every workstation machine I
> install.
> Achieving the same using the Ubuntu installer would have required a lot
> of manual mdadm and lvm pv/vg/lv** commands. (Let alone their basic disk
> partitioning tool)
>
> ... In their race for Joe-six-pack and Apple like polish, Ubuntu gave up
> on many Linux core capabilities. Hopefully Fedora will -not- follow
> suite.

Hello,

I am doing the same setup, nice to see someone else with those
requirements. actually without kickstart setting up softraid in
anaconda was broken (try it manually without precreated partitions...
it will drive you insane). out of the box booting didnt work when
/boot was on a mirror raid and the mbr wasnt cloned either. not that
great of an out of the box experience. i had those issues in f11 f12
and f13.
but hey... instead of redundancy having some colored automatically
selected flags and languages is probably more important after all.

kind regards,
Rudolf Kastl


>
> - Gilboa
>
> - Gilboa
>
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 02:16:49PM +0200, Dennis Jacobfeuerborn wrote:
> The only way to accomplish this without actually removing the features is 
> to have two anaconda modes one for easy desktop installation and one full 
> featured mode. This mode should be chosen not by the user but by the spin 
> e.g. the desktop spin would use the easy mode and the server or workstation 
> spins would use the full featured one.

Anaconda actually has the ability to do this with "install classes".


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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Dennis Jacobfeuerborn]

On 10/12/2010 04:20 PM, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 02:16:49PM +0200, Dennis Jacobfeuerborn wrote:
>> The only way to accomplish this without actually removing the features is
>> to have two anaconda modes one for easy desktop installation and one full
>> featured mode. This mode should be chosen not by the user but by the spin
>> e.g. the desktop spin would use the easy mode and the server or workstation
>> spins would use the full featured one.
>
> Anaconda actually has the ability to do this with "install classes".
>

I figured as much and my guess is that anaconda already has most of the 
required stuff implemented and it's really just a case of lining up the 
bits and pieces the right way.

Another question is where to split this off exactly:

1) Different spins
2) Boot menu option (default=easy and an "advanced" option)
3) Selection screen when anaconda starts
4) "advanced" buttons in the anaconda pages

 From top to bottom I would say the implementation work probably decreases 
but the danger of one install path "contaminating" the other probably 
increases. What that means is that at 1) you end up with two completely 
distinct installation procedures which requires more work to implement but 
can really be customized for the different target audiences whereas at 4) 
you share a lot of stuff even in the interface but the different 
installation methods must have a similar workflow which doesn't allow for 
much individualization.

Regards,
   Dennis
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Neal Becker]

Dennis Jacobfeuerborn wrote:

> On 10/12/2010 10:28 AM, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>>> Striving for usability and pleasantness for the untechnical users
>>> certainly is a good thing. It gets problematic when you choose to make
>>> things technically inferior just to please those kind of users.
>>
>> We don't have to make things inferior to improve usability.  To stick
>> with the "advanved storage" example:  IMHO the selection screen between
>> basic and advanced storage is confusing and superfluous.  First it
>> should probably be named "local storage" and "SAN storage".  Second
>> anaconda can default to local storage if a local disk is present (option
>> to add SAN storage needs to be there of course).  If no local disk is
>> present it can go straight to SAN setup.  One screen and one mouse click
>> less for most of the users.
> 
> If you want to appeal to the same audience Ubuntu is going for then you
> have to remove choice. The whole storage bit needs to be completely
> removed or at least stripped down. "advanced storage" certainly has to
> disappear completely.

I don't agree.  There's nothing unusual about a dumbed-down interface for 
novices, with an 'advanced' tab hiding more options.

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Bastien Nocera]

On Mon, 2010-10-11 at 11:11 -0400, Chris Lumens wrote:
> >  - downloads updates in parallel too
> 
> Package updates?
> 
> >  - uses IP geolocation to guess the user's timezone and keyboard
> >settings (it's been 100% correct for me each time)
> 
> We can do this, it's just never really been brought up.  I'd like to
> rework a lot of the l10n stuff anyway, there just never seems to be
> time.

Would like to see this as well.

> >  - suggests a username and hostname based on the user's real name
> >(Mac OS X's installer also does this -- it's a nice touch)
> 
> If DNS knows a hostname, we will suggest that.  Of course it's not
> foolproof.

That's not it. Your name is entered (Chris Lumens) and from it you
should get a hostname (chris-lumens-fedora-desktop.local) as well as a
presentation name ("Chris Lumens' Fedora Desktop") which could be used
for things like services being advertised through avahi, or even the
default name for the Bluetooth adapters.

See xdg-hostname on Freedesktop.org. I'd definitely like to see
something like that move forward so people can have nice names for their
Bluetooth adapters on the machines, and remove the need for me to show a
text entry to change that name in gnome-bluetooth.

> mgracik is working on the username suggestion thing already.
> 
> > Thoughts?  Can we switch to their installer?
> 
> No.
> 
> - Chris


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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Bastien Nocera]

On Mon, 2010-10-11 at 11:41 +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> I installed and played with Ubuntu 10.10 over the weekend (in a VM),
> and I have to say that their installer is very smooth indeed.  It's
> starting to make anaconda look distinctly clunky.
> 
> Some of the things it does which are IMHO better:
> 
>  - starts disk formatting / copying / installing in parallel
>with asking user questions
> 
>  - downloads updates in parallel too
> 
>  - uses IP geolocation to guess the user's timezone and keyboard
>settings (it's been 100% correct for me each time)
> 
>  - suggests a username and hostname based on the user's real name
>(Mac OS X's installer also does this -- it's a nice touch)
> 
> This is in contrast to anaconda (certainly from the live CD install)
> which seems to be a usability no-go area.
> 
> Thoughts?

Could somebody send in bug numbers for the RFEs they filed already?

>   Can we switch to their installer?
> 
> Rich.
> 
> -- 
> Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
> Read my programming blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
> Fedora now supports 80 OCaml packages (the OPEN alternative to F#)
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Máirín Duffy]

On Mon, 2010-10-11 at 19:23 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-10-11 at 15:44 -0400, Jon Masters wrote:
> > Sadly enough, this means that a shiny Ubuntu installer is to the whole
> > distribution what GNOME shell is to the GNOME project. It doesn't matter
> > if you've got a lot of bells and whistles underneath, or what you can
> > do, if you don't look pretty while you do it. It's just the reality. I
> > would venture that one of the reasons Rich sent his mail originally is
> > that he's aware of this mentality and pointing out its effects.
> 
> You forgot to qualify the above paragraph: it doesn't matter _to a
> distribution reviewer_. We aren't necessarily making Fedora for
> distribution reviewers.

But impressions that get spread around do tend to haunt you.

The most technically-superior solution unfortunately doesn't always
enjoy the popularity it could have. (e.g. Beta max :) )

~m

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Jesse Keating]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

On 10/12/10 7:20 AM, Rudolf Kastl wrote:
> I am doing the same setup, nice to see someone else with those
> requirements. actually without kickstart setting up softraid in
> anaconda was broken (try it manually without precreated partitions...
> it will drive you insane). out of the box booting didnt work when
> /boot was on a mirror raid and the mbr wasnt cloned either. not that
> great of an out of the box experience. i had those issues in f11 f12
> and f13.
> but hey... instead of redundancy having some colored automatically
> selected flags and languages is probably more important after all.

Have you been participating in the test days and filing bugs?  We've
done many raid setups, it's part of our release criteria, and we haven't
ran into the issues you seem to be describing above.

- -- 
Jesse Keating
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Jesse Keating]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

On 10/12/10 7:20 AM, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 02:16:49PM +0200, Dennis Jacobfeuerborn wrote:
>> The only way to accomplish this without actually removing the features is 
>> to have two anaconda modes one for easy desktop installation and one full 
>> featured mode. This mode should be chosen not by the user but by the spin 
>> e.g. the desktop spin would use the easy mode and the server or workstation 
>> spins would use the full featured one.
> 
> Anaconda actually has the ability to do this with "install classes".
> 
> 

Anaconda used to have an Advanced mode where things like the complex
partitioning and package selection were hidden.  Turns out, the vast
majority of people who used anaconda and said something about it had
picked advanced mode, because they felt their case was special.  If
everybody uses advanced mode, that becomes the norm...

- -- 
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Chuck Anderson]

On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 08:06:59AM -0700, Jesse Keating wrote:
> -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> On 10/12/10 7:20 AM, Matthew Miller wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 02:16:49PM +0200, Dennis Jacobfeuerborn wrote:
> >> The only way to accomplish this without actually removing the features is 
> >> to have two anaconda modes one for easy desktop installation and one full 
> >> featured mode. This mode should be chosen not by the user but by the spin 
> >> e.g. the desktop spin would use the easy mode and the server or 
> >> workstation 
> >> spins would use the full featured one.
> > 
> > Anaconda actually has the ability to do this with "install classes".
> > 
> > 
> 
> Anaconda used to have an Advanced mode where things like the complex
> partitioning and package selection were hidden.  Turns out, the vast
> majority of people who used anaconda and said something about it had
> picked advanced mode, because they felt their case was special.  If
> everybody uses advanced mode, that becomes the norm...

Making "advanced" only a choice at the beginning of a 10 step process 
is a non-starter and leads to the problem you describe above.  If 
instead there were "Advanced Options..." in each step along the way 
that could be opened/closed at will, that would allow users to explore 
the advanced options without worrying that they made the "wrong 
choice" way back at the beginning of the 10 step process, whether or 
not they actually end up using the advanced options.
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Jesse Keating]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

On 10/12/10 8:13 AM, Chuck Anderson wrote:
> Making "advanced" only a choice at the beginning of a 10 step process 
> is a non-starter and leads to the problem you describe above.  If 
> instead there were "Advanced Options..." in each step along the way 
> that could be opened/closed at will, that would allow users to explore 
> the advanced options without worrying that they made the "wrong 
> choice" way back at the beginning of the 10 step process, whether or 
> not they actually end up using the advanced options.

So like how the storage screen now has an advanced option...

- -- 
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2010-10-12 at 16:40 +0200, Dennis Jacobfeuerborn wrote:
> On 10/12/2010 04:20 PM, Matthew Miller wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 02:16:49PM +0200, Dennis Jacobfeuerborn wrote:
> >> The only way to accomplish this without actually removing the features is
> >> to have two anaconda modes one for easy desktop installation and one full
> >> featured mode. This mode should be chosen not by the user but by the spin
> >> e.g. the desktop spin would use the easy mode and the server or workstation
> >> spins would use the full featured one.
> >
> > Anaconda actually has the ability to do this with "install classes".
> >
> 
> I figured as much and my guess is that anaconda already has most of the 
> required stuff implemented and it's really just a case of lining up the 
> bits and pieces the right way.
> 
> Another question is where to split this off exactly:

Live vs. traditional seems like the obvious split to me.
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2010-10-12 at 10:53 -0400, Neal Becker wrote:

> I don't agree.  There's nothing unusual about a dumbed-down interface for 
> novices, with an 'advanced' tab hiding more options.

As someone else has pointed out, a lot of usability experts consider
this a bad idea, for two reasons:

1) everyone thinks they're an expert, even if they're not, and hits
'advanced'

2) it creates a confusing decision point for *everyone*: how do you know
if you need the 'advanced' options? You can't really know without
looking at them, so you have to look at them to decide if you need them,
so essentially we're presenting the advanced options to everyone...
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[drago01]

On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 6:30 PM, Adam Williamson  wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-10-12 at 10:53 -0400, Neal Becker wrote:
>
>> I don't agree.  There's nothing unusual about a dumbed-down interface for
>> novices, with an 'advanced' tab hiding more options.
>
> As someone else has pointed out, a lot of usability experts consider
> this a bad idea, for two reasons:
>
> 1) everyone thinks they're an expert, even if they're not, and hits
> 'advanced'
>
> 2) it creates a confusing decision point for *everyone*: how do you know
> if you need the 'advanced' options? You can't really know without
> looking at them, so you have to look at them to decide if you need them,
> so essentially we're presenting the advanced options to everyone...

Well most people just press "Next", "Next", "Next" 
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Jos Vos]

On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 09:30:45AM -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:

> 2) it creates a confusing decision point for *everyone*: how do you know
> if you need the 'advanced' options? You can't really know without
> looking at them, so you have to look at them to decide if you need them,
> so essentially we're presenting the advanced options to everyone...

100% agreed.  You do not know in advance what options will not be shown
in non-advanced mode (e.g. custom filesystem layout, MBR at a different
partition, etc.).  As a CLI expert I'm considering myself all but a GUI
expert, but I never understood how people can "guess" the corect answer
to this kind of undefined questions (like "do you want basic or advanced
install mode?").

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2010-10-12 at 18:34 +0200, drago01 wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 6:30 PM, Adam Williamson  wrote:
> > On Tue, 2010-10-12 at 10:53 -0400, Neal Becker wrote:
> >
> >> I don't agree.  There's nothing unusual about a dumbed-down interface for
> >> novices, with an 'advanced' tab hiding more options.
> >
> > As someone else has pointed out, a lot of usability experts consider
> > this a bad idea, for two reasons:
> >
> > 1) everyone thinks they're an expert, even if they're not, and hits
> > 'advanced'
> >
> > 2) it creates a confusing decision point for *everyone*: how do you know
> > if you need the 'advanced' options? You can't really know without
> > looking at them, so you have to look at them to decide if you need them,
> > so essentially we're presenting the advanced options to everyone...
> 
> Well most people just press "Next", "Next", "Next" 

As I recall, several distros have done usability studies and found that
this isn't actually true. People have been *trained* to just press next,
next, next under specific circumstances - like Windows software
installation - but it's not everyone's default behaviour, especially the
kinds of people who tend to install Linux distributions. (Have you ever
observed people trying to use subway ticket machines in an unfamiliar
city? They certainly don't just click next, next, next, in my
experience. They read every screen carefully and worry which of the many
options to choose. Frequently, when the process is too complex, they
worry that they've somehow got something wrong, cancel, and start
over.) 

Even when people do it, it's more of an 'exasperation fallback': it's
what people do when they hit their breaking point of potential
decisions, they go 'oh what the hell, I'll just hit next on everything'.
If we get to that point we've already 'lost', because we exasperated the
user: even if they happen to get a fully functional install, they're not
happy with the experience.

It'd be nice if anyone who's been involved in Fedora UX studies could
contribute...
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[drago01]

On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 7:03 PM, Adam Williamson  wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-10-12 at 18:34 +0200, drago01 wrote:
>> On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 6:30 PM, Adam Williamson  wrote:
>> > On Tue, 2010-10-12 at 10:53 -0400, Neal Becker wrote:
>> >
>> >> I don't agree.  There's nothing unusual about a dumbed-down interface for
>> >> novices, with an 'advanced' tab hiding more options.
>> >
>> > As someone else has pointed out, a lot of usability experts consider
>> > this a bad idea, for two reasons:
>> >
>> > 1) everyone thinks they're an expert, even if they're not, and hits
>> > 'advanced'
>> >
>> > 2) it creates a confusing decision point for *everyone*: how do you know
>> > if you need the 'advanced' options? You can't really know without
>> > looking at them, so you have to look at them to decide if you need them,
>> > so essentially we're presenting the advanced options to everyone...
>>
>> Well most people just press "Next", "Next", "Next" 
>
> As I recall, several distros have done usability studies and found that
> this isn't actually true. People have been *trained* to just press next,
> next, next under specific circumstances - like Windows software
> installation - but it's not everyone's default behaviour, especially the
> kinds of people who tend to install Linux distributions.

Any pointers to those studies?
Not saying that you are lying, but I am actually interested to see them.

> (Have you ever
> observed people trying to use subway ticket machines in an unfamiliar
> city? They certainly don't just click next, next, next, in my
> experience. They read every screen carefully and worry which of the many
> options to choose. Frequently, when the process is too complex, they
> worry that they've somehow got something wrong, cancel, and start
> over.)

It involves money ;)

> Even when people do it, it's more of an 'exasperation fallback': it's
> what people do when they hit their breaking point of potential
> decisions, they go 'oh what the hell, I'll just hit next on everything'.
> If we get to that point we've already 'lost', because we exasperated the
> user: even if they happen to get a fully functional install, they're not
> happy with the experience.

Or they think "don't care, just install the damn thing".
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2010-10-12 at 19:15 +0200, drago01 wrote:

> > As I recall, several distros have done usability studies and found that
> > this isn't actually true. People have been *trained* to just press next,
> > next, next under specific circumstances - like Windows software
> > installation - but it's not everyone's default behaviour, especially the
> > kinds of people who tend to install Linux distributions.
> 
> Any pointers to those studies?
> Not saying that you are lying, but I am actually interested to see them.

No, unfortunately - I remember stuff from ages-old blog posts and
mailing lists but I'm not a good note/bookmark taker so I have no
references :(
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 9:18 AM, Evan Dandrea  wrote:
> I'm not challenging your point that the Fedora installer offers more complex
> options.  I just wanted to clarify our approach, as our users are not screwed
> in these circumstances, we just clearly separate their use cases to different
> CDs.


We struggle a lot with how to position multiple image targets
effectively to appease both our existing vocal contributorbase and
simutenously provide something that appeals to the
yet-to-be-initiated.  The default Fedora desktop livecd is meant to be
the installer image for the "go with the defaults." novice user  It's
not clear to me that we need the traditional installer experience (ie
non-live) that hides more than it already does. I'm not really sure
we've identified a usage case for such a thing that shouldn't already
be a target for the live image installer.

One question for you. Do you have a process by which people coming to
your web properties can attempt to self-select which install image
they want before downloading one? Do you chart a course to guide users
to make a decision on whether to download the alternative image before
first attempting to use the streamlined live image? Or do users tend
to reach for the alternative image only after they bump up against
customization constraints in the live installer you provide?

-jef
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Dennis Jacobfeuerborn]

On 10/12/2010 05:13 PM, Chuck Anderson wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 08:06:59AM -0700, Jesse Keating wrote:
>> -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
>> Hash: SHA1
>>
>> On 10/12/10 7:20 AM, Matthew Miller wrote:
>>> On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 02:16:49PM +0200, Dennis Jacobfeuerborn wrote:
 The only way to accomplish this without actually removing the features is
 to have two anaconda modes one for easy desktop installation and one full
 featured mode. This mode should be chosen not by the user but by the spin
 e.g. the desktop spin would use the easy mode and the server or workstation
 spins would use the full featured one.
>>>
>>> Anaconda actually has the ability to do this with "install classes".
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Anaconda used to have an Advanced mode where things like the complex
>> partitioning and package selection were hidden.  Turns out, the vast
>> majority of people who used anaconda and said something about it had
>> picked advanced mode, because they felt their case was special.  If
>> everybody uses advanced mode, that becomes the norm...
>
> Making "advanced" only a choice at the beginning of a 10 step process
> is a non-starter and leads to the problem you describe above.  If
> instead there were "Advanced Options..." in each step along the way
> that could be opened/closed at will, that would allow users to explore
> the advanced options without worrying that they made the "wrong
> choice" way back at the beginning of the 10 step process, whether or
> not they actually end up using the advanced options.

This assumes that the workflow for both methods is always the same which is 
pretty limiting. Maybe for the simple installation you don't want a storage 
configuration screen at all and simply put up an option to overwrite the hd 
completely or install next to an already present os. Perhaps you can even 
put this on the screen where the user enters his name since this selection 
doesn't really warrant its own screen at all.

Regards,
   Dennis
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[James Antill]

On Tue, 2010-10-12 at 16:00 +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-10-11 at 11:11 -0400, Chris Lumens wrote:
> > >  - suggests a username and hostname based on the user's real name
> > >(Mac OS X's installer also does this -- it's a nice touch)
> > 
> > If DNS knows a hostname, we will suggest that.  Of course it's not
> > foolproof.
> 
> That's not it. Your name is entered (Chris Lumens) and from it you
> should get a hostname (chris-lumens-fedora-desktop.local) as well as a
> presentation name ("Chris Lumens' Fedora Desktop") which could be used
> for things like services being advertised through avahi, or even the
> default name for the Bluetooth adapters.

 The Mac does this too, and I'm sure it's great for avahi stuff ... but
it's really annoying for anyone using the hostname anywhere else (mainly
due to the expected size).
 Is there nowhere else that we could store a "hostsummary" instead of
hostname?

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Evan Dandrea]

On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 6:56 PM, Jeff Spaleta  wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 9:18 AM, Evan Dandrea  wrote:
>> I'm not challenging your point that the Fedora installer offers more complex
>> options.  I just wanted to clarify our approach, as our users are not screwed
>> in these circumstances, we just clearly separate their use cases to different
>> CDs.
>
>
> We struggle a lot with how to position multiple image targets
> effectively to appease both our existing vocal contributorbase and
> simutenously provide something that appeals to the
> yet-to-be-initiated.  The default Fedora desktop livecd is meant to be
> the installer image for the "go with the defaults." novice user  It's
> not clear to me that we need the traditional installer experience (ie
> non-live) that hides more than it already does. I'm not really sure
> we've identified a usage case for such a thing that shouldn't already
> be a target for the live image installer.
>
> One question for you. Do you have a process by which people coming to
> your web properties can attempt to self-select which install image
> they want before downloading one? Do you chart a course to guide users
> to make a decision on whether to download the alternative image before
> first attempting to use the streamlined live image? Or do users tend
> to reach for the alternative image only after they bump up against
> customization constraints in the live installer you provide?

Sure.  Guiding the users to the correct CD for their particular use
case is not an area of my expertise - that's the job of our design and
marketing teams; however, I'll try to answer your question to the best
of my ability.

You can follow the path to the different desktop CDs from here:

http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download

The alternate CD can be found under the alternative downloads link,
with an explanation that it "is suited for computers unable to run the
graphical desktop based installation, either because their computer
does not meet the minimum requirements for the live cd or because
their computer requires configuration after the installation is
complete in order to use the desktop."

So I believe that we assume that users will fall into your
last-mentioned path: they will bump up against the customization
constraints of the live CD installer, search for a solution, and find
their way to the alternate CD.

We include the alternate installer on our live DVD image, but getting
to it is not obvious.  A splash screen briefly appears with a keyboard
icon in the bottom-center of the screen at boot.  If you press a key,
then the following menu appears ("text mode" is the alternate
installer):

http://blog.keesmeijs.nl/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/cryptobuntu_boot.png

I realize that I have rudely not introduced myself, so do excuse my
belated attempt.  If it was not already clear, I am the maintainer of
ubiquity, Ubuntu's desktop CD installer.
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 10:42 AM, Evan Dandrea  wrote:
> You can follow the path to the different desktop CDs from here:
>
> http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download
>
> The alternate CD can be found under the alternative downloads link,
> with an explanation that it "is suited for computers unable to run the
> graphical desktop based installation, either because their computer
> does not meet the minimum requirements for the live cd or because
> their computer requires configuration after the installation is
> complete in order to use the desktop."

I followed the links and ended up with torrent ticket download links.
Taking a look at the ubuntu torrent tracker stats at
http://torrent.ubuntu.com:6969/ and I'm seeing a _shockingly_ low
amount of activity there. Like disturbingly low.  Much much lower than
what we see on our Fedora torrent tracker
(http://torrent.fedoraproject.org:6969/). Was the Ubuntu torrent
tracker restarted or purged recently?

-jef
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Evan Dandrea]

I honestly have no idea.
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Manuel Escudero]

2010/10/12 James Antill 

> On Tue, 2010-10-12 at 16:00 +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> > On Mon, 2010-10-11 at 11:11 -0400, Chris Lumens wrote:
> > > >  - suggests a username and hostname based on the user's real name
> > > >(Mac OS X's installer also does this -- it's a nice touch)
> > >
> > > If DNS knows a hostname, we will suggest that.  Of course it's not
> > > foolproof.
> >
> > That's not it. Your name is entered (Chris Lumens) and from it you
> > should get a hostname (chris-lumens-fedora-desktop.local) as well as a
> > presentation name ("Chris Lumens' Fedora Desktop") which could be used
> > for things like services being advertised through avahi, or even the
> > default name for the Bluetooth adapters.
>
>  The Mac does this too, and I'm sure it's great for avahi stuff ... but
> it's really annoying for anyone using the hostname anywhere else (mainly
> due to the expected size).
>  Is there nowhere else that we could store a "hostsummary" instead of
> hostname?
>
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>


I believe anaconda is Ok, But many users complain about it, I honestly can't
understand why.
What I can undersand and even say is that anaconda needs a little "more
polished" experience.

I mean, in the "look part" Fedora needs a re-birthday, we use same graphics
combination in anaconda,
the same Gnome theme, the same themes to pick for (gtk) and mostly the same
that when Fedora started.

I believe we need to polish that look part, as far as I understand an O.S.
Needs to be newer in each
new version not only in features, but also in look. If we can give that to
users, discussions like these ones
will be present in a fewer number.

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Manuel Wolfshant]

On 10/12/2010 10:35 PM, Manuel Escudero wrote:
>
>
> 2010/10/12 James Antill  >
>
> On Tue, 2010-10-12 at 16:00 +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> > On Mon, 2010-10-11 at 11:11 -0400, Chris Lumens wrote:
> > > >  - suggests a username and hostname based on the user's real
> name
> > > >(Mac OS X's installer also does this -- it's a nice touch)
> > >
> > > If DNS knows a hostname, we will suggest that.  Of course it's not
> > > foolproof.
> >
> > That's not it. Your name is entered (Chris Lumens) and from it you
> > should get a hostname (chris-lumens-fedora-desktop.local) as
> well as a
> > presentation name ("Chris Lumens' Fedora Desktop") which could
> be used
> > for things like services being advertised through avahi, or even the
> > default name for the Bluetooth adapters.
>
>  The Mac does this too, and I'm sure it's great for avahi stuff
> ... but
> it's really annoying for anyone using the hostname anywhere else
> (mainly
> due to the expected size).
>  Is there nowhere else that we could store a "hostsummary" instead of
> hostname?
>
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>
>
>
> I believe anaconda is Ok, But many users complain about it, I honestly 
> can't understand why.
because it's ugly. among ALL installers that I've used ( mint / debian / 
suse >=9 ) anaconda has the ugliest user interface. And I mean all 
versions that I ever used , in RH ( pre-RHEL era), Centos and Fedora.

> What I can undersand and even say is that anaconda needs a little 
> "more polished" experience.
exactly. there are tons of facilities but the aspect "could be improved"

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 11:32 AM, Evan Dandrea  wrote:
> I honestly have no idea.

Hmm. That's unfortunate. It appears from the web pages that the
preferred way to get the alternative images is the torrent ticket (as
it appears ahead of the mirror urls). If users are meant to bump their
head on the low bar of the desktop install and then search for
alternative image, I would have expected them to be showing up in the
torrent tracker stats in significant numbers.

The low activity on the Ubuntu torrent server generally really leaves
me scratching my head as to how to evaluate the applicability of the
alternative image approach.

-jef
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 12:46 PM, Jeff Spaleta  wrote:
> The low activity on the Ubuntu torrent server generally really leaves
> me scratching my head as to how to evaluate the applicability of the
> alternative image approach.

Just to provide some closure on this. I watched the Ubuntu torrent
tracker for a few hours today and saw the aggregate total downloaded
column at the end of the table drop to a lower number.
>From this I surmise that the ubuntu torrent tracker is not configured
as I would expect. It seems like its purging its aggregate data nearly
continuously.  This makes it an invalid source of trending data.

Evan, you might want to poke at a sysadmin inside your fenceline and
see if they can change the behaviour so that its not purging its
aggregate download stats so aggressively so that it can be used as a
data source for release timescale and multi-release timescale
trending.  There's precious little publicly available information
about linux distribution update trending. It seems a shame to squander
Ubuntu's torrent tracker aggregate stats.

-jef
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Gerd Hoffmann]

On 10/12/10 18:39, Jos Vos wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 09:30:45AM -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
>
>> 2) it creates a confusing decision point for *everyone*: how do you know
>> if you need the 'advanced' options? You can't really know without
>> looking at them, so you have to look at them to decide if you need them,
>> so essentially we're presenting the advanced options to everyone...
>
> 100% agreed.  You do not know in advance what options will not be shown
> in non-advanced mode (e.g. custom filesystem layout, MBR at a different
> partition, etc.).  As a CLI expert I'm considering myself all but a GUI
> expert, but I never understood how people can "guess" the corect answer
> to this kind of undefined questions (like "do you want basic or advanced
> install mode?").

"advanced install mode" is a non-started as discussed elsewhere in this 
thread.  It must be more fine-grained, i.e. each installation step 
(where it make sense) should offer some button to see the advanced options.

And it probably shouldn't be labeled "Advanced ..." but say what kind of 
advanced stuff is hidden there, i.e. the "advanced storage" button 
should be labeled "Add SAN storage ..." because this is what it actually 
is about.  Now you can figure whenever you need that or not without 
klicking and looking, see?

cheers,
   Gerd
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Chris Jones]

On Mon, 2010-10-11 at 11:41 +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> I installed and played with Ubuntu 10.10 over the weekend (in a VM),
> and I have to say that their installer is very smooth indeed. 

As a full-time Ubuntu user, I just want to point out that I don't really
like the Ubuntu installer and its whole process. Although I do prefer to
use to distro itself.

When I do use Fedora, I really enjoy the whole live-image-copy process
as its super fast and efficient and it does the job well. It's much
faster than the installer of Ubuntu.
So again, as a full-time Ubuntu user, the Fedora Development Team should
be very proud of what they've achieved with the Fedora and Anaconda
Installer.


Regards

Chris Jones


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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Rudolf Kastl]

2010/10/12 Jesse Keating :
> -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
> Hash: SHA1
>
> On 10/12/10 7:20 AM, Rudolf Kastl wrote:
>> I am doing the same setup, nice to see someone else with those
>> requirements. actually without kickstart setting up softraid in
>> anaconda was broken (try it manually without precreated partitions...
>> it will drive you insane). out of the box booting didnt work when
>> /boot was on a mirror raid and the mbr wasnt cloned either. not that
>> great of an out of the box experience. i had those issues in f11 f12
>> and f13.
>> but hey... instead of redundancy having some colored automatically
>> selected flags and languages is probably more important after all.
>
> Have you been participating in the test days and filing bugs?  We've
> done many raid setups, it's part of our release criteria, and we haven't
> ran into the issues you seem to be describing above.

Let me clarify. On the criteria page i read (have to dig out the link)
it said that bugs regarding having /boot on softraid are ignored at
this point, so no i didnt bother filing a report. sounded like a known
issue.
As for the test day. Really, i always try to help out on test days but
i guess i was too busy/on the road when this one happened. Manually
setting up softraids with mdadm works like a charm btw. What is
problematic is setting up the correct partition layout manually with 2
drives because anaconda moves around and reenumberates the partitions
when you add new ones. (that drove me to insanity.) also note that
using kickstart works like a charm aswell.

in the notes i only found:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F13_bugs#Booting_from_an_mdraid_mirror_without_a_separate_.2Fboot_fails

Atleast on the f12 install this also failed with a seperate boot.  I
am going to keep my eyes open for f14 and doing an install with the
current f14 state soon to see which of those issues is still left and
file appropriate reports regarding the open issues. I am really
curious also if it will automatically make both disks of the mirror
setup bootable (writing grub to both mbrs).

kind regards,
Rudolf Kastl

kind regards,
Rudolf Kastl

>
> - --
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> identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Jesse Keating]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

On 10/13/10 2:04 AM, Rudolf Kastl wrote:
> Let me clarify. On the criteria page i read (have to dig out the link)
> it said that bugs regarding having /boot on softraid are ignored at
> this point, so no i didnt bother filing a report. sounded like a known
> issue.
> As for the test day. Really, i always try to help out on test days but
> i guess i was too busy/on the road when this one happened. Manually
> setting up softraids with mdadm works like a charm btw. What is
> problematic is setting up the correct partition layout manually with 2
> drives because anaconda moves around and reenumberates the partitions
> when you add new ones. (that drove me to insanity.) also note that
> using kickstart works like a charm aswell.
> 
> in the notes i only found:
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F13_bugs#Booting_from_an_mdraid_mirror_without_a_separate_.2Fboot_fails
> 
> Atleast on the f12 install this also failed with a seperate boot.  I
> am going to keep my eyes open for f14 and doing an install with the
> current f14 state soon to see which of those issues is still left and
> file appropriate reports regarding the open issues. I am really
> curious also if it will automatically make both disks of the mirror
> setup bootable (writing grub to both mbrs).
> 

Ok, so what you're saying is, that the specific case of having /boot on
softraid didn't work for you.  I may have missed that clarification in
your first email.  I do find it odd because I constantly test scenarios
where /boot is a small mirror and / is a large stripe and it seems to
work every time for me, often starting from blank disks.  I'll test that
scenario again soon, maybe there is something I'm doing that you're not,
or vice versa?

- -- 
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Emmanuel Seyman]

* Chris Jones [13/10/2010 11:35] :
>
> As a full-time Ubuntu user, I just want to point out that I don't really
> like the Ubuntu installer and its whole process. Although I do prefer to
> use to distro itself.

Amen, I've lost count of the amount of times installing Ubuntu has
involved installing Fedora to partition the drive correctly then
installing Ubuntu telling it to use the existing partition.

Emmanuel

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Tomasz Torcz]

On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 02:28:05AM -0700, Jesse Keating wrote:
> -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> On 10/13/10 2:04 AM, Rudolf Kastl wrote:
> > Let me clarify. On the criteria page i read (have to dig out the link)
> > it said that bugs regarding having /boot on softraid are ignored at
> > this point, so no i didnt bother filing a report. sounded like a known
> > issue.
> > 
> 
> Ok, so what you're saying is, that the specific case of having /boot on
> softraid didn't work for you.  I may have missed that clarification in
> your first email.  I do find it odd because I constantly test scenarios
> where /boot is a small mirror and / is a large stripe and it seems to
> work every time for me, often starting from blank disks.  I'll test that
> scenario again soon, maybe there is something I'm doing that you're not,
> or vice versa?

  I encountered this problem when using preupgrade.  This is already filled
in bugzilla, ate least those two:
- preupgrade doesn't work with software raided /boot
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=97
- preupgrade/anaconda can't use install.img (stage2) on RAID
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=54

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Rudolf Kastl]

2010/10/13 Jesse Keating :
> -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
> Hash: SHA1
>
> On 10/13/10 2:04 AM, Rudolf Kastl wrote:
>> Let me clarify. On the criteria page i read (have to dig out the link)
>> it said that bugs regarding having /boot on softraid are ignored at
>> this point, so no i didnt bother filing a report. sounded like a known
>> issue.
>> As for the test day. Really, i always try to help out on test days but
>> i guess i was too busy/on the road when this one happened. Manually
>> setting up softraids with mdadm works like a charm btw. What is
>> problematic is setting up the correct partition layout manually with 2
>> drives because anaconda moves around and reenumberates the partitions
>> when you add new ones. (that drove me to insanity.) also note that
>> using kickstart works like a charm aswell.
>>
>> in the notes i only found:
>> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F13_bugs#Booting_from_an_mdraid_mirror_without_a_separate_.2Fboot_fails
>>
>> Atleast on the f12 install this also failed with a seperate boot.  I
>> am going to keep my eyes open for f14 and doing an install with the
>> current f14 state soon to see which of those issues is still left and
>> file appropriate reports regarding the open issues. I am really
>> curious also if it will automatically make both disks of the mirror
>> setup bootable (writing grub to both mbrs).
>>
>
> Ok, so what you're saying is, that the specific case of having /boot on
> softraid didn't work for you.  I may have missed that clarification in
> your first email.  I do find it odd because I constantly test scenarios
> where /boot is a small mirror and / is a large stripe and it seems to
> work every time for me, often starting from blank disks.  I'll test that
> scenario again soon, maybe there is something I'm doing that you're not,
> or vice versa?

hmm could be. actually what i do is i create 2 partitions on each disk
( for /boot and the rest) and then i softraid each pair and put lvm on
top of the non /boot md of course due to the limitations of legacy
grub (raid 10 would be faster but... i like the lvm functionality).
All raid setups are simple mirrors with 2 disks. I already had the
trouble that the partition enumberation would change numbers and order
during creating the partitions (to workaround that i precreated the
partitions before starting the installer). after completing an install
like that the system refused to boot (as far as i remember when it was
supposed to read and handle the initrd.) i was assuming that it maybe
doesent have the raid modules loaded or not available in the
initramfs, but this is just a guess, i cannot remember really.

what succeeded was... installing the os on one disk using lvm (/boot /
/home swap). creating the mdraid with missing instead the first disk
on the second physical hds partitions. then adding the md devices to
the vg and pvmoving the first physical disk out... later adding the
disk in the "missing" slot of the md and also mirror raiding the /boot
partition followed by an update of the initramfs.

kind regards,
Rudolf Kastl


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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[David Woodhouse]

On Tue, 2010-10-12 at 00:29 +0800, Liang Suilong wrote:
> Anaconda does not easily support upgrading from internet. It is quite
> regretful. 

Did you mean to say 'Ubuntu installer' here too? Anaconda certainly does
support upgrading from the Internet. And it's *too* easy -- I often find
it's using an Internet repository without even offering me the choice of
using my local NFS mirror.

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Pekka Pietikainen]

On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 10:16:00AM +0200, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
> "advanced install mode" is a non-started as discussed elsewhere in this 
> thread.  It must be more fine-grained, i.e. each installation step 
> (where it make sense) should offer some button to see the advanced
>options.

The "Show a screenful of sane defaults for lots of stuff" with a "Change"
button next to each sounds good to me, and probably could just be a front
for the current dialogs (which might not be perfect, but they are quite
good)

If the keyboard, timezone etc. are correct (based on autodetection/GeoIP
when available) then why make the user even press Next?

If "Nuke everything and use LVM on my 1TB Seagate" is ok, same there.  If
"Standard desktop" is fine, then so be it.  If not, press "Change",
select "Server" and if that's not good either, fiddle with
the packages while you're over there.

Personally I would probably like a cmd line option to anaconda for it to
fetch some file through http (kickstart :) ), and that would have my
favourite packages listed, and I could pretty much just press "Install"
after anaconda starts up (after verifying that everything got detected
correctly).  Pretty much the current situation, except I wouldn't have to
go through all of those dialogs.

I'm no UX person, though. Maybe people want to think about one thing
at a time and then press Next :D
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Gilboa Davara]

On Tue, 2010-10-12 at 18:18 +0100, Evan Dandrea wrote:
> The Ubuntu installer does let you use a NFS root for your installation source.
> 
> On the point of needing something more complex, such as LVM or full disk
> encryption, that's what we offer our alternate CD installer (debian-installer)
> for.
> 
> I'm not challenging your point that the Fedora installer offers more complex
> options.  I just wanted to clarify our approach, as our users are not screwed
> in these circumstances, we just clearly separate their use cases to different
> CDs.

Thanks for the head's up, I considered suicide when I recently tested
10.10/DVD/amd64 and tried doing some standard partitioning using the
default DVD tool. (Unless I missed something, once you create a
partition is stays put, you cannot edit or move it. Nothing beats
creating 5 partitions, just to find out that the first partition [/boot]
is 20MB instead of 200MB - forcing you to delete and restart... Pure
joy)


- Gilboa


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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Gilboa Davara]

> Hello,
> 
> I am doing the same setup, nice to see someone else with those
> requirements. actually without kickstart setting up softraid in
> anaconda was broken (try it manually without precreated partitions...
> it will drive you insane). out of the box booting didnt work when
> /boot was on a mirror raid and the mbr wasnt cloned either. not that
> great of an out of the box experience. i had those issues in f11 f12
> and f13.
> but hey... instead of redundancy having some colored automatically
> selected flags and languages is probably more important after all.
> 
> kind regards,
> Rudolf Kastl

When installing Fedora on machine with -large- amount of drives (8-16),
I simply use a single sfdisk script to create the same partition table
on all drives. When dealing with smaller configurations (3-4 drives),
Anaconda is OK. (At least to me)

As for MBR: I assume that like me, you create a small RAID1 for /boot
and RAIDX for the rest, hoping the first disk won't die on a DVD-less
machine :)
In-order to solve it (when I remember to do it :)), I simply dd 446
bytes from the first drive to every other drive.

- Gilboa

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2010-10-13 at 10:16 +0200, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:

> And it probably shouldn't be labeled "Advanced ..." but say what kind of 
> advanced stuff is hidden there, i.e. the "advanced storage" button 
> should be labeled "Add SAN storage ..." because this is what it actually 
> is about.  Now you can figure whenever you need that or not without 
> klicking and looking, see?

Nope, because that's not all it does. You also need the 'advanced'
storage mode if you want to explicitly exclude disks from being
considered during installation at all, which was previously part of the
normal installation flow; now you're only shown that screen if you pick
the 'advanced' mode. A button saying 'SAN storage and explicit device
selection...' is rapidly getting uglier, and I'm sure there's other
stuff that's in that path which that description still doesn't cover.
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2010-10-13 at 02:28 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote:

> Ok, so what you're saying is, that the specific case of having /boot on
> softraid didn't work for you.  I may have missed that clarification in
> your first email.  I do find it odd because I constantly test scenarios
> where /boot is a small mirror and / is a large stripe and it seems to
> work every time for me, often starting from blank disks.  I'll test that
> scenario again soon, maybe there is something I'm doing that you're not,
> or vice versa?

As I recall it, Jesse, Rudolf's right - there are known issues with
having /boot on a soft RAID and that's why it's explicitly excluded from
the release criteria. Unfortunately it's sufficiently long since FUDCon
Toronto that I can't recall what the known issues were exactly, but
anaconda team may.
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Simo Sorce]

On Wed, 13 Oct 2010 08:23:23 -0700
Adam Williamson  wrote:

> On Wed, 2010-10-13 at 02:28 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote:
> 
> > Ok, so what you're saying is, that the specific case of
> > having /boot on softraid didn't work for you.  I may have missed
> > that clarification in your first email.  I do find it odd because I
> > constantly test scenarios where /boot is a small mirror and / is a
> > large stripe and it seems to work every time for me, often starting
> > from blank disks.  I'll test that scenario again soon, maybe there
> > is something I'm doing that you're not, or vice versa?
> 
> As I recall it, Jesse, Rudolf's right - there are known issues with
> having /boot on a soft RAID and that's why it's explicitly excluded
> from the release criteria. Unfortunately it's sufficiently long since
> FUDCon Toronto that I can't recall what the known issues were
> exactly, but anaconda team may.

pre-upgrade doesn't work if boot is on raid.
I don't remember other issues when you install from disk.

Simo.

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Dennis Jacobfeuerborn]

On 10/13/2010 05:21 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-10-13 at 10:16 +0200, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
>
>> And it probably shouldn't be labeled "Advanced ..." but say what kind of
>> advanced stuff is hidden there, i.e. the "advanced storage" button
>> should be labeled "Add SAN storage ..." because this is what it actually
>> is about.  Now you can figure whenever you need that or not without
>> klicking and looking, see?
>
> Nope, because that's not all it does. You also need the 'advanced'
> storage mode if you want to explicitly exclude disks from being
> considered during installation at all, which was previously part of the
> normal installation flow; now you're only shown that screen if you pick
> the 'advanced' mode. A button saying 'SAN storage and explicit device
> selection...' is rapidly getting uglier, and I'm sure there's other
> stuff that's in that path which that description still doesn't cover.

This discussion is what you get when you try to make both groups happy with 
a single solution and in the end this usually kills any progress because 
not only do they not come to an agreement initially but even if they do any 
future changes now have to be agreed upon by both sides.

This sort of tight coupling is exactly what should be avoided if you want 
to make both groups of users happy.

Regards,
   Dennis
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Przemek Klosowski]

On 10/13/2010 10:53 AM, Gilboa Davara wrote:

> When installing Fedora on machine with -large- amount of drives (8-16),
> I simply use a single sfdisk script to create the same partition table
> on all drives. When dealing with smaller configurations (3-4 drives),
> Anaconda is OK. (At least to me)
>
> As for MBR: I assume that like me, you create a small RAID1 for /boot
> and RAIDX for the rest, hoping the first disk won't die on a DVD-less
> machine :)
> In-order to solve it (when I remember to do it :)), I simply dd 446
> bytes from the first drive to every other drive.

Just curious: you script the creation of an identical partition table,
and then you copy 446 bytes which specifically copies the MBR without 
the partition table which is in bytes 447-512. Why not just copy the 
entire 512 bytes to all the disks from the first one?

I guess one reason might be if the disks did not have identical CHS 
geometry, which can happen for the identically sized disks. I have heard 
rumors that even a single model drives had been seen with different 
geometries in different firmware revisions.
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Gilboa Davara]

On Wed, 2010-10-13 at 11:50 -0400, Przemek Klosowski wrote:
> Just curious: you script the creation of an identical partition table,
> and then you copy 446 bytes which specifically copies the MBR without 
> the partition table which is in bytes 447-512. Why not just copy the 
> entire 512 bytes to all the disks from the first one?
> I guess one reason might be if the disks did not have identical CHS 
> geometry, which can happen for the identically sized disks. I have heard 
> rumors that even a single model drives had been seen with different 
> geometries in different firmware revisions.

I'm paranoid, that why :)
While in most machines, I have identical drives from the same
manufacturer, in others, I specifically buy drive of the same size, but
from different manufacturers and even different dates to reduce the risk
of simultaneous death of multiple drives. (Same drive, same
manufacturer, same batch, same day, etc)
As you pointed out, different drives, can have more-or-less identical
partition size, with different CHS in the partition table.

As I don't trust myself to use the -right- size every time (446 vs 512),
I simply assume the worse.

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Ralf Ertzinger]

Hi.

On Wed, 13 Oct 2010 22:26:18 +0200, Gilboa Davara wrote

> As you pointed out, different drives, can have more-or-less identical
> partition size, with different CHS in the partition table.

I my experience the hard disk vendors have been astonishingly coordinated
in how much sectors a drive of a given size should have.
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Gilboa Davara]

On Wed, 2010-10-13 at 23:51 +0200, Ralf Ertzinger wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> On Wed, 13 Oct 2010 22:26:18 +0200, Gilboa Davara wrote
> 
> > As you pointed out, different drives, can have more-or-less identical
> > partition size, with different CHS in the partition table.
> 
> I my experience the hard disk vendors have been astonishingly coordinated
> in how much sectors a drive of a given size should have.

... My experience is somewhat different, but as I said, I'm paranoid :)

- Gilboa

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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Lars Seipel]

On Tuesday 12 October 2010 21:28:24 Evan Dandrea wrote:

> You absolutely can automate it, using the same preseeding mechanism found
> in debian-installer. 

Thanks for the info. Didn't know Debian preseeding can be used with the Ubuntu 
live installer as well. That boosts usability to another level when installing 
on more than one computer is desired and other techniques aren't feasible.

Lars.
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Przemek Klosowski]

On 10/13/2010 05:51 PM, Ralf Ertzinger wrote:
> Hi.
>
> On Wed, 13 Oct 2010 22:26:18 +0200, Gilboa Davara wrote
>
>> As you pointed out, different drives, can have more-or-less identical
>> partition size, with different CHS in the partition table.
>
> I my experience the hard disk vendors have been astonishingly coordinated
> in how much sectors a drive of a given size should have.

Total numbers of sectors may be the same---but the way the partitions 
are defined in the partition table requires the use of correct CHS disk 
geometry. Of course modern disks don't even have a well-defined physical 
geometry---the  number of sectors per cylinder varies between the inner 
and outer tracks---but they still must declare one as a weird historical 
artifact required by the BIOS and traditional partition table layout. 
The manufacturers lie about it, e.g. declaring dozens of heads, but 
what's worse different manufacturers lie about it differently.

Warning: what follows is boring and geeky, and might be wrong because a) 
I haven't worked with this stuff for a while now and b) things change as 
the disks get biger and newer.

The reason the partition table has to represent the partition boundaries 
not as a Linear Block Address (LBA) sector count but as a 
Cylinder/Head/Sector coordinates, is because the BIOS booting code uses 
CHS access method. If those numbers assume wrong disk geometry
then the partition ends up being non-contiguous because IIRC, the 
calculation from CHS to LBA goes somehow like this:

LBA = c * (H*S) + h * S + s

where c, h, s are the CHS coordinates of a partition in the partition 
table, and C, H and S are the total 'reported' number of cylinders, 
heads and sectors on the drive. If you copy the chs numbers without
converting them for the different CHS geometry, you will get different 
and wrong LBA addresses, i.e. different partitioning.
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Lars Seipel]

On Tuesday 12 October 2010 15:56:02 Dennis Jacobfeuerborn wrote:
> Now we are really talking semantics. The point is that users should not be
> confronted with choices they don't really need to make or they don't
> understand.

I disagree. How should a user know about some nice feature if its whole 
existence is hidden from his eyes? Yeah, he should read the documentation but 
aren't we talking about improving usability right now? Imagine some random 
user does his installs the hard way for years and now discovers (someone tells 
him oder he learns about it by chance by searching the documentation for an 
unrelated problem) that Anaconda has the capabilities to make his life easier.

He goes like: "Woow cool, this is the stuff I've been searching for years. I 
don't have to waste my precious time anymore by setting all of this up by 
hand. Anaconda now takes care of it. Didn't thought those Anaconda developers 
are that genious. But why on earth didn't they tell me before their software 
was capable of doing that? Do they actually like watching people suffer? 
Seriously, you guys suck!"

Hiding features doesn't have to be beneficial to usability. It can be harmful, 
too.

> As long as most of these defaults and menus are not displayed initially
> that would probably be fine.
> The problem here is that every time you present the user with data dumps
> (e.g. lists of defaults) or menus you create a cognitive hurdle where the
> user wonders what he's supposed to do or gets worried that he breaks
> something. Minimizing that is really key to creating a streamlined
> installation interface.

There are other ways to prevent confusion and worries about potential 
brokenness. If there are sane defaults and it is clearly communicated to the 
user that using those is the recommended way and gives him the best results in 
most cases, I don't see a problem. If users can trust in those defaults being 
sane and that by not touching them they get a good default configuration, they 
aren't helpless as they know what to do. However, if they wish to change 
something in future attempts they already know where they have to look. 

> new installed system. The user doesn't care at all about "partitions",
> "LVM" or "mountpoints".

I think you are strongly limiting the definition of what an user can be. So who 
is an user of Anaconda? For me, that is all those people using Anaconda. There 
is some guy from your neighborhood installing Fedora to surf the internet. 
There is some developer installing Fedora to work on the latest and greatest 
software in the GNU/Linux/X/freedesktop.org stack. There are designers using 
Anaconda to install the free software they need to create your favorite 
layout. There are also sysadmins deploying Fedora/RHEL/CentOS to many 
computers in their company, a public school or at your ISP's datacenter. So 
when you restrict Anaconda's userbase to just one kind of user, the whole 
assumption on which you build your enhancements to usability is wrong and will 
lead to software which sucks in usability as soon as you want to do something 
that you didn't consider basic enough to show it to users.

Lars.
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Re: Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 10/12/2010 03:56 PM, Dennis Jacobfeuerborn wrote:
> On 10/12/2010 02:52 PM, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>> On 10/12/2010 02:16 PM, Dennis Jacobfeuerborn wrote:
>>> On 10/12/2010 10:28 AM, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
Hi,

> Striving for usability and pleasantness for the untechnical users 
> certainly is
> a good thing. It gets problematic when you choose to make things 
> technically
> inferior just to please those kind of users.

 We don't have to make things inferior to improve usability.  To stick
 with the "advanved storage" example:  IMHO the selection screen between
 basic and advanced storage is confusing and superfluous.  First it
 should probably be named "local storage" and "SAN storage".  Second
 anaconda can default to local storage if a local disk is present (option
 to add SAN storage needs to be there of course).  If no local disk is
 present it can go straight to SAN setup.  One screen and one mouse click
 less for most of the users.
>>>
>>> If you want to appeal to the same audience Ubuntu is going for then you
>>> have to remove choice.
>>
>> Why? All that would be required would be to move it out of this
>> audience's way (the "defaults").
>
> Now we are really talking semantics.
I don't think so.

> The point is that users should not be
> confronted with choices they don't really need to make or they don't
> understand.
My point is to offer users who want choice the choices they want and not 
to force them into something they do not want.

>> As Gerd mentioned in another mail, SUSE's installer seems interesting
>> wrt. this. Its "defaults" cater the demands of "uneducated desktop
>> installers", while still allows many kinds of complex setups outside of
>> the "defaults" in "advanced menus".
>
> As long as most of these defaults and menus are not displayed initially
> that would probably be fine.
Please get yourself a SUSE DVD and try yourself - I was very positively 
surprized, esp. about SUSE's "disk partitioner's work-flow".

It is easy to use for beginners (Click-through), while it still allows 
complex setups.

> The problem here is that every time you present the user with data dumps
> (e.g. lists of defaults) or menus you create a cognitive hurdle where the
> user wonders what he's supposed to do or gets worried that he breaks
> something. Minimizing that is really key to creating a streamlined
> installation interface.
>
> The second aspect is that you want to talk to the user in terms of his
> "problem" and not in terms of the underlying technology.
Correct, ... my needs differ from that of others, ... therefore the 
tools being provided by a distro need to cater my needs, otherwise the 
distro doesn't fit my needs.

> For example a user
> wants to either replace the current System completely or install the
> distribution into free space on his HD and but into either the old or the
> new installed system.
Correct, that some user's demand .. but definitely not all, and could 
not be further away from my demands.

> The user doesn't care at all about "partitions",
> "LVM" or "mountpoints". This is different from the more apt user who wants
> to actually have control over these details (where exactly to put
> partition(s) on the disk for example).
Correct ... The latter for instance is what I had needed. I wanted to 
compare SUSE against Fedora. So I installed SUSE in parallel to other 
OSes (amongst them Fedora and Windows) on to the same machine.

If my only choice would have been erase Fedora and/or Windows, ... this 
distro would have disqualified itself.

> The issue here is that keeping these advanced features available could have
> a negative impact on the "easy-mode" experience.If you manage to prevent
> that from happening than more power to you but if not then creating two
> distinct workflows is really the only option.
I can't avoid to disagree.

Spawning different installers means duplicating work and wasting resource.

Ralf

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