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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?
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
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?
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
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...
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