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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."

3 of 401 comments (clear)

  1. Bob just chose all the default selections by ObviousGuy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

    --
    I have been pwned because my /. password was too easy to guess.
  2. Muhammad "average" User by pjpII · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  3. Easy Install? by SoupIsGood+Food · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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