Suggestions for LiveCD installer on Dapper

[Colin Watson]

On Fri, Mar 17, 2006 at 10:57:20AM -0600, Dennis Drescher wrote:
> 1) Partitioning: I wasn't doing a fresh install. I needed to install in 
> another existing partition. Having the partition manager pop up was 
> impressive but it was confusing and not helpful. I continued on 
> (stumbled on was more like it) and came to the dialog that let me select 
> existing partitions with a check box for formating and a drop-down list 
> to specify what it is for. Is there anyway to get that to pop up before 
> the partition manager. Or, allow more editing in the partition manager 
> so I can simply select the partitions I want to work with and tell it 
> which ones to format. (I realize this is a sticky area but novice users 
> are going to need more clues as to what to do.)

Would it help if we just said "If you want to install into an existing
partition, just continue on through without changing anything and you'll
be able to select mount points later" or some such?

The mount point selector can't pop up before the partition manager,
because you need to create partitions before selecting where to mount
them. We would like to move mount point selection into the partition
manager, because the user interface would be *much* better if we did
that, but there's some messy code involved and we may not have time to
do this before Dapper. In lieu of that, explanatory text might be the
best we can do.

> 2) At one point, while it was copying files, it appeared to be hung up 
> on the language packs. I thought it had crashed but it was really doing 
> something in the background. Could some kind of message be displayed 
> during points like these to assure users that everything is still moving 
> along.

Yeah, I've got a reference to that problem on my to-do list
(https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuExpress/ToDo). It's really just a slight
bug with progress bar handling; a couple of the progress messages are
going missing somewhere.

> 3) When is started to do some of the final setup work the screen saver 
> came on. It was one that I was not familiar with and it looked like it 
> was doing some display tests. Meanwhile a dialog was waiting for my 
> input. Yes, I know I should be able to tell the difference between 
> screen tests and screen savers but in this case it caught me off guard 
> and made the install take longer because it was waiting on me. The 
> simple solution would be for the installer to automatically disable the 
> screen saver when starts up. Since you need to reboot afterwards there 
> is no longer any need for it during that session anyway. IMHO.

This is:

  https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/gnome-screensaver/+bug/34510

I've been told how to fix it now, so I'll fix it soon.

> 4) This may not be an installer problem but the shutdown didn't work and 
> the machine locked up hard. This has happened to me a number of times in 
> other situations so I did a hard reset. However, for a first time user, 
> this may not inspire confidence. It would be nice if situations like 
> that could be avoided.

At the moment we're just calling 'reboot' since I haven't quite figured
out exactly how to tell GNOME to exit cleanly and go to the graphical
shutdown; but fixing that's on the to-do list. There's also a problem
where sending SIGTERM to all processes on the live CD seems to hang at
the moment. I haven't looked into that one yet ...

Thanks for the feedback!

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]