Debian Installer Beta 3 Usability Review

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."

Comments

Bob just chose all the default selections

[ObviousGuy]

Why not have a single selection at the beginning that says "Install all defaults"? Hit that, let the installer figure out all your hardware settings, and come back an hour later with a fully installed OS.

Maybe throw in a warning that the whole disk will be wiped out, but how much user interaction does an installer really need?

Debian Going Mainstream?

[MadWicKdWire]

With RH losing a lot of stock in the tech world, I foresee Debian becoming more mainstream. The only problem about this is, Debian is usually an elitist group of users. Many users of Debian before I switched (06/2003), would just say... "You use Redhat? What are you a girl or something?" I just told them, "Bah... you stink! RPM is the coolest thing ever!" Well, I wish I could have gone back to the days when I was stupid. :) The new Debian install almost makes it as easy to install as Windows. I don't think a GUI is needed for installing an OS onto a machine, plus it causes overhead in the installer and on the disk.

IMHO... someone should create a "smart" installer that says... "I see you have Windows installed. I can remove it for you. Please press return."

I don't think it would be any problem. A good scripter/programmer could easily figure it out. I wish I could...

"Debian... Next to Jesus, it's the only way to Heaven"

I have tried

[Wierd Willy]

Several times to install Debian/Gnu on my SGI Indy. As a relative cherry when it comes to goofy installs this is a problem. The websites I have found all seems to take for granted nuances I should probably already know but are left unsaid. Suuch things as WHICH machine to set up WHAT file on and suchlike. The Indy is an r4400 with 96 meg and a 4.3 Gig HD. It does NOT boot from disk. Instructions aimed at knuckleheads such as myself need this goofy level of detail to learn things y'know. I do have a pretty decent redhat 9 machine on the network here that is supposed to be used for the TFTP bootloader but there is detail about setting that up that is also left unsaid. It would be really cool if someone actually tried to understand that there are geeks out there that dont know things and want to learn.

Dammit.

Muhammad "average" User

[pjpII]

I certainly hope that Debian's Arabic support isn't as bad as that in the installer- the letters don't connect! They're typed from left to right! This would be like having the English installer say something like the following:
(ASU)hsilgnE ni deecorp ot siht esoohC

Except that its even worse - imagine all the i's seperated from their dots, which are written separately next to them in linear order. And even that would be less ridiculous.

As someone who does use Arabic frequently when computing, it's something less than a stunning endorsement of Debian

Easy Install?

[SoupIsGood Food]

I've been playing around with various operating systems on an old dual-processor Sun Ultra2 Creator3D, including Debian.

By far the easiest and quickest install was NetBSD and OpenBSD... if it weren't for lack of SMP support (OpenBSD) or Creator3D ffb framebuffer support (NetBSD), I'd stick with one of them and be happy.

Gentoo required a copy of the install guide at hand, but it went smoothly until the time came to unpack the stage from the LiveCD... all three were corrupted, choked and died in mid un-tar. I'm going to see if there are newer LiveCD ISO's available, but it's not a rolicking start, and requires too much command line fiddling to start the show. Still, apart from the abject failure to install the tarballs, the process itself is very straight forward.

Unlike Debian, which has a miserable interface that's at once too convoluted and too spartan to be of any use, and is rotten at picking reasonable defaults. I spent the better part of two days trying to get a booting, networked operating system out of the damn thing.

Maybe Splack, Aurora and SuSe are better... haven't tried them yet, but compared to NetBSD's clean ASCI console installer, the two popular Linux distros come up way short. (Solaris isn't much of an improvement.)

Here's the trick: simplify and automate wherever you can, and pick reasonable defaults while offering options to users who know what they're doing. No need for bright, shiny MS-DOS psuedo-GUI's, just a reasonable curses-based interactive program that prompts the user when needed, but otherwise goes and installs a working operating system on its own with minimal intervention required, but available if wanted.

SoupisGood Food

Re:Reminds me of Redhat

[jrockway]

Hmm, I have XFree86 4.3.0 and linux 2.6.3. Both installed from packages (actually I compiled 2.4.3 for this machine, but my server uses the stock debian 2.6.3 kernel).

Anyway, yeah Debian Stable is old. That's a feature.

Debian unstable, however, is bleeding edge, but not broken. It's great. Much newer than any other distro.

Debian gives the user the choice of old packages/high reliability or new packages/average reliability. That's better than semi-recent pcakages/semi-decent reliability that Mandrake, Fedora, Slackware, and SuSE offer.

Thanks, apt*.

* Other distros have apt, but Debian's is better because the debian developers use it properly. I've NEVER had a dependency problem (problems yes, but they weren't too bad). Apt is the best feature of any operating system I've ever used.

Re:Mandrake

[jrockway]

Windows is for the Mainstream crowd. I mean, most people don't care about Freedom or choice in software. Sometimes you have to deal with a "hard" installer to get a "better" OS.

I was raised on MacOS. I have no problems with anything under Linux.

I am good at reading, though. If you like reading, and don't mind having to think, Linux is for you. Otherwise, it's probably not worth it.

Re:Wow

[Lord Kano]

Grow some new chest hairs and install Debian, the only GREAT distribution!

If you want to get frustrated enough to pull out all of your chest hairs, try installing Gentoo.

After about 6 hours, I have given up on it. The gentoo-cursors package wouldn't install from ANY of the mirrors.

LK

Re:Isn't "new" and "debian" in the same sentence

[Trejkaz]

I couldn't see much difference between this installer and the last one anyway. Although the notable difference is there doesn't seem to be any way to do alternate steps this time around.

Still, when I heard "new installer" I was thinking "GUI". Sucks to be disappointed.

Re:Wow

[Afrosheen]

Yeah, but the Gentoo-cursors package wouldn't install ALOT FASTER than other distributions.

Gentoo people, can you back me up on this one? Gentoo is lightning quick from what I hear!

Amen

[freeweed]

I'm a relatively recent Debian convert, thanks to my friends raving about apt-get mostly. I shied away from Debian for a long time because I could never figure out the installer. It's just about the most user-unfriendly application I've ever used. Almost as if they went out of their way to have everything different than everything else (hint: if 99.9% of apps use the arrow keys and enter to select options in a menu, you may want to do the same. Random keys to choose things do not help the user).

Anyway, after struggling with dselect and whatever else is involved (quite frankly I always got lost about 1/4 of the way in), I discovered Knoppix. It's a non-guru's wet dream, really. Until the day I entered "apt-get upgrade". The next time I booted my machine, squid and apache were both running and were actually listening for connections. My machine tried to load ISDN drivers for some reason, along with something related to braille. I never really spent the time trying to figure out why a metric shitload of new services/modules were being loaded, because unfortunately I needed to use my computer in an unsecured environment. Oh, and I can't remove openoffice anymore either. Apt claims it's not installed, yet it runs fine. *shrug*

Installing software (and removing things other than openoffice) are a dream. Apt-get is godly. Knoppix itself has just the right amount of stuff in it for me, with some interesting extras I never would try if they weren't there. But I'll never again try an entire upgrade :)