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Debian Sarge Installation Slide Show
brunotorres writes "I've made an slide-show, presenting the steps of Debian sarge (testing) installation. I put images of all relevant steps of the installation and a brief description of each one. It's nice to notice that debian-installer is much more straightforward and user friendly in sarge than it was in woody."
As far as the Ubuntu installer goes, you're actually looking at the exact same installer, just with fewer questions asked.
http://www.donarmstrong.com
When it comes to installing X workstations I prefer to install debian testing using Knoppix which has a very nice graphical installer. It also provides the benefit of letting you know that debian will actually run X on your hardware.
To install Knoppix:
boot with the Knoppix CD
Open a terminal and:
$ su root
# knoppix-installer
and away you go.
Religion is poison to rationality, and we lose sight of that at our own peril. -- Lurker2288
Your point about partioning is well taken. Windows and OSX suffer from the same problem when installed from scratch.
Here's the problem: They all assume the person doing the install knows what "partioning" means. That's an invalid assumption. Users are faced with dire warnings about the destruction of your hard drive and numerous unexplained option.
Some Linux installs try to avoid this by simply offering to "take over" the entire drive. That's a brute force approach that isn't attractive to many people.
Perhaps a middle approach might be to offer an "expert" option, but to present mainstream users with a display that simply says "Your disk(s) have ___ free space. How much of it do you want to use for Linux?" Some distros come close, but everyone I've seen still calls it "Partioning" and still displays scary warnings easily misinterpreted by users.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
No, it isn't from expert mode -- OTOH he's consequently picking the manual route where he could have gone for automatic behaviour (at least in the boot process and the partitioning). Most of the screens are non-interactive or can normally be answered by pressing "enter" anyhow, so it's not really that hard :-)
/* Steinar */
(This comment is of course GPLed.)
I think the Debian folks have done a wonderful job so far; the auto-detection is a godsend. That being said, I think that the UI could still use some work. The one thing that caught my eye while going through the instalation was that I would have no idea how to use the screens presented. As an example:
On the second step of the installer, it asks you to select a region. On this screen, there appears to be perhaps a menu and then a <Go Back> button at the bottom. When I first saw this screen, the only thing I could think to myself is "How do I select the region? I don't see a radio button, I don't see checkmarks and the only action related button is it go back - How do I get off of this screen?"
It seems that there is a mixture of UI techniques. Either the entire installer should be menu based, in which case the <Go Back> button would be integrated into the menu or they should go with a wizard approach in which each screen has buttons for <Go Back> and <Go Forward> and each select list is turned into perhaps a radio or check-mark based list. I think that the pure-wizard type solution would be preferable as most user's have gone through wizard's before.
Along the same lines, when the term "select" is used in a text based installer, it should be clear HOW an item is to be selected? Do I hit enter? Spacebar? Am I supposed to be able to use a mouse? If so, why doesn't mine work etc etc etc.
Well, thus ends my two-cents worth. I hope that anyone reading this doesn't take this as an insult towards the installer team: they are doing wonderful things and they should keep in mind that thing about UIs is that opions on them are like arseholes: everyone has one.