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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."
The Debian Installer can install Slackware then?
Hate me!
What happened to Joe User? Did he finally wise up about using GUIs and get fired or something? I never really liked Joe User, anyway (I mean, what an idiot!), I'm just curious.
True story.
an oxymoron? :P
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
Everything mandrake does is gpl'd, so there's no reason that debian couldn't keep their crazy "hard" installer for traditionalists and setup the mandrake installer to install debian easy-like for newbies. why duplicate effort?
Hasn't Knoppix made the Debian installer a moot point for Bob 'Average' User, at least for the desktop?
Complete with linux 2.2.20 and XFree86 4.1.0.
If he had never installed any OS from scratch before, sure, he would be confused - but he would be just as confused if he had pulled out the raw W2K install disks on a rainy Saturday.
sPh
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"
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)... oops
So this is where RedHat 5.x installer went to... I was wondering what happened to it.
A lot about the process can be learned this way. Most of us are used to this process, and think it all makes sense, but, as the author points out, there are a lot of things that WON'T make sense to "Bob User."
Debian should have a look a this to see what they can improve.
IBM is doing something smart, a call went out to employees looking for volunteers to install Linux on their company laptops. This is a great way to start, because those employees will probably feel a lot like "Bob" but have access to internal tech support.
Wouldn't you like to convert your friends without having to be THEIR tech support?
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.
Stupid Humans.....
If it were truly easy to use, there would be no need for a walkthrough guide... each screen would present choices, and offer help if needed. Software installers should NEVER require external documentation.
Can we all please make this the last GNU/Linux "usability" study that begins with some ridiculous description of a "joe shmoe" mythical target user. I am sick and tired of it. It is possible to make something usable for "normal" users, while at the same time comfortable for both "mewbies" and "power users". Please let us retire "Bob" and "Aunt Tillie" and "Grandma" and every other stupid target user.
If you don't agree with my statement in the first paragraph go look at http://www.google.com - great for newbies AND power users. I've never heard anyone say "Google works fine for Aunt Tillie and Uncle Bob but I really could use MORE features to the interface." Its interface is clean, simple and completely intuitive. And if you want to do some arcane power search you CAN!.
And if google isn't a good enough example for you (because its a website and not an OS, etc.) look at GNOME. GNOME has proven that you can make a good clean interface that is user friendly, newbie friendly, and has all the access a "power user" could want. Yes, I firmly believe that the whining about lack of config options in every panel is entirely from masochistic freaks that simply like to know they can easly change whether the delay to close a window when the close button is clicked is 2ms or 3ms WITHOUT having to open a configuration editor. And BTW gconf-editor IS super simple and user friendly ANYWAY!)
Besides, I am probably what most people would consider experienced with Debian GNU/Linux (been using it exclusively for about 3 years) and I like a good clean, intuitive interface over something that is so-called "geek friendly" any day.
BTW - No I haven't read the whole article yet, I saw the bob bit and HAD to get this off my chest before I read the rest (now I will).
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
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
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.
My other car is first.
My rants...
Last week, my friends convinced me to try Debian OS to replace my old Red Hat Linux 7.x boxes. I either could go to Gentoo or Debian since I didn't want Red Hat any more due to the recent news. A few hardcore Linux users told me to try Debian first. So, I grabbed the Network Install to a bootable CD-RW.
Since I only wanted to explore the OS, I used VMware v4.0.5 (256 MB of RAM) on a Pentium 4 3 Ghz host machine. Everything was going well until Debian installer asked a few tricky questions. They were tricky enough even for me, as a computer geek and Linux user (not an expert).
I struggled with partitioning. The text based UI is nuts. I couldn't use up and down arrow keys. Also, there was no mouse pointer at this stage. At least add a mouse pointer or make this part GUI like Red Hat's installer (only used 7.x versions). I also had difficulities setting up partitions which is I am never good with even with Microsoft OS'.
With the help of a Debian friend, I got through this part. Then, the questions got really tricky like which mouse port (/dev/what?). I don't remember. There should be some type of autodetection. IIRC, Red Hat did autodetect for me and that was about three years ago.
More questions came up. There was one part where I had to enter a hostname. Little did I know, I was NOT supposed to use any capital letters. For example with JohnDoeFooBar, I kept getting an error later during setup from Debian about hostname problems. I changed it to something like johndoe, and no more problems! The setup never told me this. On my old Red Hat Linux boxes, it let me use capitalized letters like: JOHNdoe-P2.
The other part I struggled was, why didn't Debian's setup give me an option to boot into text mode. I didn't want gdm or any GUI login screens. I prefer text modes like in the old days. Red Hat 7.x did give me this option. I had to get help from my friend to fix this.
I am still learning Debian slowly. I just learned apt-get command which is nice. It isn't easy for a Debian newbie like me. The installer does need to be improved.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Though the earlier screen had told him that his selection would affect his location he was still at the same place, in front of his old PC. ...and...
But it didn't matter as he just had deleted his Windows 98 with fdisk.
The "average user" is happy to see that the computer didn't teleport him somewhere else, but can still figure out Windows 98 fdisk???
Online reviews would be much better if we could moderate by throwing rotten fruit at the author...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
For what it's worth, I am the "Bob User" that he wrote for, and the article seemed to fairly accurately reflect the thought process that I would have gone through.
As far as easy installs go... I've plugged this before, but I think it's worth repeating that Arklinux has a really smooth install (including a little Tetris game to play during loading). After using Knoppix only a few times, I was able to install Ark on a Compaq laptop and give it a whirl.
Of course, your mileage may vary, but I'm dual-booting Ark on my home computer, and I've switched to using it exclusively (except when I'm playing Disney's Toontown, which only runs on I.E.), and I know next to nothing (I sort of know what a command line is, but that's about it.)
It's still in Alpha, so do be careful, but I would HIGHLY recommend it for clueless "windoze" users looking to get their feet wet.
The Dalai Llama
I would while away the hours conversatin' with the flowers... if I only had a .sig
My sig could be your sig!
Debian has it harder than the other guys; most distributions focus on just one platform (intel), or just a few (alpha, sparc, powerpc). Debian supports 11 hardware platforms. They need a flexible system that supports the needs of all of them. I'm not personally knowledgable about the internals of either the Debian or Mandrake installers, but this is probably one of the reasons they can't just use an "off-the-shelf" installer from another distro.
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.
you can install debian over the serial port on x86 boxes.
Try that with a GUI!
Google says Bob will use XP with the preinstalled NTFS and it's quite probable he doesn't want to dump it immediately and because Debian still doesn't support non-destructive NTFS resizing thus the install will fail for him.
Not sure which command line installer you are talking about, the only one I know of at all is gentoo. Debian's installer isn't a command line installer, its a tui and yes there is a very big difference between a command line interface and a text user interface.
Go to Mandrake forums and read about all the poeple that have difficulties with getting the installer to work properly. Don't get me wrong; I'm not flaming Mandrake. They have their purpose, but it is a different one than Debian's.
If you have normal stuff (1 year old intel processor, intel chipset, nvidia video card, one 1024x768x24bpp screen, ata133 hard drive) than those automated installs work just fine. But deviate too much from the norm, and things start getting really hairy with Mandrake. The fact is that Debian supports a TON of architectures and a TON of hardware, those automated installs probably won't work properly at all on many of the architectures that Debian supports.
That being said, Debian is probably going to eventually get a nice new graphical installer courtesy of Red Hat.
why Joe User or Bob, rather, is installing debian anyway? The last Debian install I did was on a AMD 5x86/100 tablet (three nights ago). Before that, it was on my Dell Inspiron 1100 that had a crockload of not-well-supported hardware that required me to get 2.5.69 (the latest release at the time).
Debian installs usually take me several hours to get most things going from the mini/net install (a linux distro occupying 80 MB on your HD?--yeah, debian does that) to a what-I-consider usable system. However, I've configured everything myself exactly to my liking and probably recompiled once or twice.
Before I go further on my disorganised rant, a graphical easy to use installer that detected everything and booted me into KDM/X with KDE (I use enlightenment and gtk apps) would do nobody in Debian's core audience any good whatsoever and probably only alienate them further.
Tho I have to say, a few years ago, Storm Linux had a really kickass installer. Progeny's doesn't/didn't require you to reboot afterwards.
So I probably should be saying that if Bob wants a Linux distro that's easy to install in the beginning yet insanely powerful in the end (thanks to apt), he should be dealing with Progeny or whatever other debian-based distros there are.
The article did Debian a tremendous disservice in juxtaposing a mythical user with a distro that he'd never try.
P.S. My favorite install of all time is OpenBSD's. A twenty minute script was all it took--and I hadn't installed OpenBSD before. How kickass it that?
"[T]he single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom." -- Barry Goldwater
Rick Moen has a great page of alternative Debian installers if you don't like this one.
Debian can be installed over the FreeBSD kernel: here's some more information on that
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
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
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Windows 2000/XP: Partially text-mode, and yet, could be easily installed by ANYBODY.
Knoppix - Winner for obvious reasons
RedHat - A bit overcomplicated the last time I used it, but easy nonetheless. The graphical installer is nice, but doesn't always work. If you're lucky, you're sent to the curses-based textmode installer which is lightyears better than debian's. (of course, there are screwups, and videocard detection can crash on exotic hardware)
Gentoo - No installer is a good installer. HONESTLY! If you carefully follow their directions exactly using the examples they give you, a proficent Windows user could get it working. The installation process is incredibly well-documented. As a plus, a quick post to their forum will usually yield a solution in under an hour. I have yet to see another free distro which offers that kind of support. Despite all this, they still need a REAL installer.
Mac OS X : Next, I agree, Next, Yes, Reboot. Done. Enough said.
BeOS: I once accidentally installed this without realizing it (the version that came packaged for windows).
Debian: From the people that brought you EMACS! Debian was my first distro, mostly because it was availible on floppies (my PC at the time wouldn't boot from a CD), and it had a nifty install-on-demand feature which required you to only download the 20mb base (yes, onto floppies), which would then allow you to set up a LAN or PPP connection to download the proper packages (I was on 56k, so the PPP option was a godsend). Needless to say, it wasn't all that difficult or painful, though it had quite a few rough spots. (Such as a nasty bug where the installer's FDISK mixed up the device names, causing me to nuke the wrong partition.
This was 3 years ago. The screenshots in the article show an installer that's almost identical to the one I remember. Honestly, couldn't they have made SOME advances? The installer is simply a disgrace, and needs to be 10x easier!
As for me, I'll stick with my mac. I like an OS that doesn't have to be reinstalled regularly.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Excellent. There isn't much you can't do with one distro or another. Debian is great. RedHat is great. SuSe is great. Gentoo is great. Slackware is great. It's simply a matter of knowing one of them VERY VERY well. I know them all pretty well and I prefer Gentoo on desktops, and FreeBSD on servers. If it has to be Linux on a server, I prefer Debian unless it can't be. Then I use Enterprise Red Hat. Based on my preferences, you would assume that I know FreeBSD and Gentoo the best, and you'd be right. The important thing is that 90 percent of all UNIX and UNIXlike OS's are identical in nature. Learn that 90 percent, then find the one with the 10 percent left that you like the best. Plenty to choose from.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.