Ximian Desktop Installer, Red Carpet, and MonkeyTalk

An anonymous reader submits: "Long-time Linux users forget what it is like to try to install something for the first time. Ximian has done a nice job writing scripts to hide the inner workings of a Gnome installation. TuxReports has snapshots of the Ximian installer. Do you believe that all Linux distributions should use such a friendly series of dialog boxes in order to attract more users to Linux?" Update: 07/14 21:13 GMT by M : Tuxreports has provided a non-PHP page for us to link to... whoops. Sorry about that.

Comments

Red Hat users note

[GigsVT]

If you corrupt your box with this Ximian Gnome, you will not be able to upgrade Red Hat without uninstalling Ximian beforehand, or manually replacing all Gnome RPMs after the upgrade.

This is something they don't tell you in all those "friendly installers".

Other things may break, such as the Red Hat Network, when a Gnome related updated comes down the line. Of course if you plan to only use Red Carpet after installing Ximian, then that's not a problem.

Ximian Rules....

[reaper20]

If the Ximian release of gnome2.0 is anything like their 1.4 release, we should really be in for a treat. They manage that slick easy to use polish without dumbing everything down. My only complaint is the 'doorman' or whatever it's called goes a little bit too newbieish.

Other than that, I always point users to the Ximian stuff, especially if they're coming from windows. It doesn't behave like windows, but it's set up really professionally.

My complaint is this: Why aren't distro's packaging ximian gnome as the default gnome distro? We all know Redhat kind of ignores the linux desktop, concentrating on the server stuff. If I was them, I'd package ximian and have an instant polished gnome desktop. Redhat employs enough gnome hackers, that in a sense, they're already subsidizing the cost of Ximian gnome anyway.

Not to take anything away from the RH gnome install, but why reinvent the wheel, Ximian has done most of the work already.

And I think everyone agrees that jimmnac and tigert could be the best linux artists anywhere ... droolworthy work from those two.

Correction

[JoshuaDFranklin]

TuxReports has snapshots of the Ximian installer.

TuxReports had snapshots of the Ximian installer.

There are only a few installer packages

[crovira]

for the Mac & Windows. Some are "blessed" by the OS Distributor and some are crafted according to written guidelines provided by the OS Distributor. The OS X installer is GREAT in that respect.

The situation MUST become the same for Linux. There must come to be some "blessed" slick GUI installer that can also run "headless" from a command line.

It should implement a state transition engine and run from a state machine which goes from an initial state "not-installed", through paths for the distros, dependencies to a terminal state of "software registered."

To make the situation complete, it must detect the distro (and therefore the install paths, dependencies and destination directories,) the GUI in use, if any, and be able to completely install AND UNINSTALL by walking backwards through the installer log undoing what was done and cleaning up all debris.

The installer "experience" is standard for the user because everybody is using the same packages or near clones of these packages to install any and every ol' thing.

And this is a lot easier for a user (or a SysAdmin,) to deal with than the ideosynchratic and often badly written readme.txt files written by somebody who just doesn't "get it" and can't remember what he didn't know when he first started out.

And the excuse that "it wasn't easy to write so it shouldn't be easy to install" is the refuge of lazy-ass, elitist, nerdy schmucks who don't have friends to watch over their shoulder, correct their grammar and actually try and test out their installation instructions to detect all the "missing" information.

Its called QA folks and you'd better get used to it or you're wasting your time pretending that you're IT pros.

Re:There are only a few installer packages

[IamTheRealMike]

Interesting you should mention this. I'm working on something called autopackage, which does exactly this.

The situation MUST become the same for Linux. There must come to be some "blessed" slick GUI installer that can also run "headless" from a command line.

Check. Autopackage is (currently) written largely in bash, but has a clean split between the backend and front end for exactly this reason. The BE and FE are actually two separate processes which communicate via a simple protocol based on unix named pipes. Right now, there is only a terminal front end, but when it's released as an OSS project (soon) I'll be looking for people to help me write KDE and GTK based installers.

It should implement a state transition engine and run from a state machine which goes from an initial state "not-installed", through paths for the distros, dependencies to a terminal state of "software registered."

Check. Autopackage deals with dependancies differently to other package managers, as it doesn't have a huge central database of everything that's on the system (it keeps enough information around to uninstall packages though obviously). Instead, it probes the system for everything the package needs - for instance it currently checks for libraries using ldconfig. If it's in the Linux Linker cache, the check is passed. This means you can install stuff from the source, or even just copy files from a friends computer without worrying about your package manager database getting out of synch.

To make the situation complete, it must detect the distro (and therefore the install paths, dependencies and destination directories,) the GUI in use, if any, and be able to completely install AND UNINSTALL by walking backwards through the installer log undoing what was done and cleaning up all debris.

Check. An autopackage is actually a program that you run (don't worry, the overhead is tiny). If you have autopackage installed, the scripts are processed and the user is greeted with a friendly GUI installer (if run from X) or if run from the command line you get the tty front end. If you don't have autopackage installed, it'll offer to automatically fetch everything the user needs from the net including a distro profile.

The profile contains all the information needed to slot files into the correct places, and perform the correct actions for adding menu items etc. If there is no profile for the users distro, I intend to have a way of letting the user easily create one (though this will probably not be an operation that can be performed by a total newbie) and then optionally upload the resultant profile for checking and inclusion. This deals with cases where people have built their own systems, or have customised them a lot.

The installer "experience" is standard for the user because everybody is using the same packages or near clones of these packages to install any and every ol' thing.

That isn't going to happen soon, which is why autopackage will integrate (at least to some extent) with RPM and perhaps Debian too. However, I intend to eventually create something similar to the apt repositories, except decentralised so it acts more like DNS rather than having huge libraries of packages that must be manually updated. I hope, dream, that one day Linux software authors will provide an autopackage as standard as well as the source tarball (they are pretty easy to make), which will plug into the autopackage network and allow you to install and update them using an apt type system.

Umm, what else? Oh yes, it's pretty flexible about asking the user stuff. The user can be asked questions during the install like which prefix to use (defaults chosen from the profile), or for commecial software they can be asked for license keys, to read EULAs and so on (commercial software is coming to linux like it or not, so i thought I might as well add these features). However, I had a bad experience once where I spent a whole week installed IE5 on each and every machine in a company by hand, so rest assured, being able to do automatic remote installs is high on my list of priorities.

I still have some basic foundation and design work to do on it, but I'm hoping it'll be out on freshmeat and ready for hacking by the end of the summer. If you're interested, then please email me. This should go a long way to solving the software management mess that Linux has somehow got itself into.

Re:Flexibility Is Key

[Pengo]

Configuration files were made to be edited by hand! This is why Linux is so popular, flexibility. By hiding configuration behind a wizard and storing that configuration in a proprietary, non-text format like some large software vender who shall remain nameless, configuration files provide for flexibility. Not to mention that big configuration files (sendmail.cf for example) allow the user to learn from their mistakes, and it is a right of passage to set up one correctly for the first time. It used to be the same for X, but now with all of the wizards (which don't work on all new cards :-)), people don't have to learn to use their computer.

This is exactly why Linux is NOT popular. I would hardly say that most people want to sit and jack around with config files. If you want the flexibility , install from the source.. but it's going to be efforts like Red Carpet that take Linux to the masses, not the continued 'Flexibility' you speak of.

When Linux can breach 25% of the desktop market on the merit of this flexibility you speak of, I will eat my words.

Naw

[B3ryllium]

I think most people here would prefer to install linux by manipulating the hard drive with magnets ...