Subject: Long report - Many things

From: Margarita Manterola <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 May 2004 17:43:45 -0300

Package: installation-reports

I'm at the debconf, I've been testing the latest build against the
hardware provided for us.  This is a Pentium IV of 2.00 GHz. with 2
network cards, 40 Gb Hard Drive, and some other nice stuff (sorry for
not pasting cpuinfo and lspci, but the machines had no network).

So, here come my comments:

Network
=======

If no network is detected with the DHCP thing, the next thing that
appears is a "Input your IP" dialog.  I think this is quite bad, since
the user might not know what to input there and be stuck.  I think the
good thing to do would be to ask: Do you want to set up the network
manually?  And if not, well, no network is setup...

When there's no network, no network should be used.  This is to say that
if no network was detected or configured, it makes no sense to inform
the user that "security" could not be reached, and that kind of stuff.

Partition Manager
=================

About the partitioning system, well, it's pretty awful, but anyway, I
think the "multi-user" setup is not properly named...  Maybe "Safe
Partitions", or "Advanced Partition Separation", or something.
Or, if you really mean to call it "multi-user" because of the size of
the /home, it would be nice to have a "Storage server" flavor, with a
big /var and a small /home.

Also, about this multi-user flavor, I was using a 40GB drive, and my /
was assigned 148Mb. This is not very wise, since we are having /etc,
/boot, /root, /bin, /sbin and /lib in this partition... I would say
maybe 256Mb would be wiser.

Of course, you already know that the design of this debconf dialogs is
difficult to read.  I have a couple of suggestions to make it a little
bit better:
  * Please add GO buttons in all (or almost all) the screens.  Instead
    of an option "Finish and proceed" that's mixed up with the other
    options.
  * Please don't make the user have to type the name of the unit (like
    GB or MB), it's error prone and confusing.  A sign saying "enter the
    value in MB" or something would be better.
  * The Tamagotchi is confusing and scaring.  It took me a long time to
    find out that there was HELP about the meaning of those.  I think
    the HELP button should be just in the middle of the Back button and
    the OK button I'm asking for in the first point.
  * "Guided partitioning" should be "Restart with guided partitioning".

Countries, Localization and Stuff
=================================

The second question of the installer is the keyboard selection.  This is
a good improvement over the previous installation that just assumed the
keyboard.  But I've noticed that in the English installation, keyboards
DO have names, while in the Spanish installation, keyboards are
identified by the layout name (la, es, br, etc).  In non of the cases is
there an alphabetical order.  I think they SHOULD be in alph. order.

When selecting the timezone, I selected "America", and then I had a long
list of cities... It would be nice to have "America" divided by
countries... I know this means adding a new debconf screen and new names
to translate, but it's really not nice to be looking for the city I'm in
the middle of a mess of cities of the whole continent.

Tasksel and Aptitude
====================

There's no going "back" from Tasksel... I selected tasksel only to see
which tasks I had available, but thinking of using aptitude to do the
proper install, and then I had no back button.  Just finish or cancel.

==============

That's about it for now.  I hope someone will read and do something
about this things... :)

--
Love,
Margarita Manterola.