20050315 DVD Installtion Report

[Matt Galvin]

Hi All,

I broke down and bought a few new DVD's today and just finished the
installtion. For a mostly untested DVD based installation, it went
very well. I came across a few mostly minor things and I also have a
few suggestions for improvements.

* I downloaded the DVD iso with wget just to have a fresh iso (will
use rsync or something else next time) (thanks to mdz for the 2GB file
limit wget fix)

* From inside my previously existing Ubuntu system I burnt the DVD
from nautilus, this went fine with the exception that the progress bar
continued scrolling/animating even after the burn was complete (no
biggie, just should not have done that)

* Slightly OT, The Disk Mounter applet slightly incorrectly displays
my DVD drive type, it displays as "DVD +/- R" and it's really a DVD
+/- RW DL, it a Pioneer DVD-108.

* Booting off the DVD worked just fine.

* The partitioner lists my DVD as a drive I can format/install onto as
/dev/ide/host0/bus1/target0/lun0/cd. Obviously I cannot use this as
the destination for the installation and it should not show up here.

* The installer tests the network repositories even though it never
uses them for the installtion. I know they will get used later on when
the system is up and for getting the latest updates, but (maybe I am
off a little) isn't the point of the DVD install to not "need" the
network at installtion time at all (normally) since all the supported
packages are on the DVD. The user will get the updates when the system
comes up via Synaptic and/or the update manager. Maybe it should test
for them here, just a suggestion.

* The DVD gets ejected upon reboot even though it is still needed to
complete the installation. I know this is just the way it works for
now but "other" OS's that still need the disc do not eject it. The
"other" OS's just don't boot off the CD it boots into the base system
and completes the installtion so long as a key is not pressed. Maybe
the bootloader on the CD can somehow detect this on a soft reboot --
maybe based on something left in /tmp/half_done_with_install. Just a
suggestion based on half a thought ;). It's not a big deal, just an
inconvienience to the user.

* I like that it set up the 686 kernel by default instead of the 386
kernel since I am using a 686 based machine :) Well done!

This concludes my review :). All in all, it went mostly as expected
and in the end it worked so that is always good :). Keep up the good
work everyone.

Thanks,

Matt