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Debian Installer Beta 3 Usability Review

Posted by timothy on from the new-member-of-the-newbie-pantheon dept.

Marcus Thiesen writes "Debian Installer Beta 3 was released two days ago and I wrote a small review concerning the installation part. The new debian installer is good way to set up your favorite distribution. Nontheless there are a few usability things and I thought that it might be a good idea to write a walkthrough from another point of view: Bob 'average' User."

6 of 401 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Bob just chose all the default selections by MBCook · · Score: 4, Informative
    I think that's a BAD idea. All those choices are important. Some may be confusing (like the Grub stuff) but it's important. If you make a "choose the default for everything" option, I would be FAR too worried that there would be many people who would choose that and then find out that it overwrote their whole hard drive, when they only thought it would choose the default selection of packages and such. As long as there are sensible defaults, I don't see any reason not to prompt them for that stuff.

    That said, much of that DOESN'T have defaults. What's the default langauge/keymap? If you have an odd keyboard you could find yourself in serious trouble. What's the default timezone? And I don't think the machine name/root password/user name/etc have good defaults either.

    I think they did a great job, and if the user wants the defaults they can just hit "enter" a bunch of times like you have to in so much software. The "all defaults" setting doesn't really start to apply untill you get to package selections and configurations. Windows does it the same way, and it makes great sense.

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  2. Re:I used Network Install a few days ago and... by calc · · Score: 5, Informative

    You most likely used the Network Install from Debian 3.0 (boot-floppies) which is 2 years old. The current installer is available from http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/ for testing and fixes most of the problems you mentioned with respect to autodetection, etc. It has worked well for me for the past year.

  3. Re:Bob just chose all the default selections by AKnightCowboy · · Score: 4, Informative
    Most people setting up linux initially (especially those that need this installer), don't care about how their drive gets partitioned or what gets installed where.

    Debian's current installer is absolutely horrible. The Solaris text based installer is even easier than Debian's! I've lost more than a few potential converts based just on the fact that they got lost trying to figure out how to do something simple like setup their network card. Off to Mandrake they went and they're happy. Oh well.

  4. Re:The *New* Installer? by calc · · Score: 4, Informative

    The look ncurses-style tui wasn't intended to be changed. All the actual code, questions, autodetection, etc are new though. Also, the installer is now modular which should help keep Debian from having to take years to fix the installer between releases like was the case with the previous installer.

  5. Re:I have tried by graveyhead · · Score: 4, Informative

    I've installed debian on 2 boxes. You need some other unixy box to start with where you:

    1) Make sure tftpd is installed. Put the 'tftpboot.img' in the tftp root (check /etc/xinetd tftp entry to find out where the root is) Also install the tftp client so you can `tftp localhost` then 'get tftpboot.img' to make sure you have access to the file.

    2) Install dhcpd. Give the SGI box an entry like this:

    host babybox {
    hardware ethernet nn:nn:nn:nn:nn:nn;
    fixed-address 192.168.0.51;
    }

    You can get your hardware ethernet address in the boot command monitor on the SGI.

    3) You may need bootparamd, but I can't figure out exactly what it's doing. I just put `192.168.0.51 = :/` in my bootparams file.

    4) There are 2 odd instructions on debian site that are necessary if you're installing using the 2.4 linux kernel as host:

    echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_no_pmtu_disc
    and
    echo "2048 32767" > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_local_port_range.

    Hope this helps!

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  6. FYI by ciroknight · · Score: 4, Informative

    Debian can be installed over the FreeBSD kernel: here's some more information on that

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