As far as my experience with the install process:
I have many years supporting Windows systems professionally in
enterprise environments -- the install process for Ubuntu blew me away
-- very quick and painless. The only problem I had was making a
decision on how I should partition my drives. For a default choice, I
believe separate partitions for root and home are appropriate, of
course we would have to include a choice to leave any windoze
partition intact. For those choosing to set up custom partitions, a
simple statement explaining the sanity behind a separate partition for
the home directory would have saved me some time googling for an
answer to the question, "what makes a good linux partition scheme?"
The hardware detection was quite good, although my laptop sound does
not work :( even though it appears that the hardware was detected
properly. Wifi required the use of the fwcutter driver which worked
for about 10 minutes, at which point I googled the problem from
another computer, and installed the ndiswrapper for the broadcom
windows drivers. Of course, because of Ubuntu's philosophy, I had to
install non-free and/or proprietary codecs for dvd viewing. Some of
these problems are due to self-imposed constraints due to ideology,
some are due to legal issues such as DRM. Before any work is done to
build a distro, ground rules need to be set to cover these issues. If
it is going to be a distro that is crippled out of the box due to
legal/philosophical issues, then it should be made clear right away
why this is so, but it should be made as painless as possible to get
the software to make things work. I think Ubuntu did a good job on the
part of providing easy installation of the software pieces, but I was
pretty much in the dark as to why I had to jump through these hoops.
In summary, I think Ubuntu's install process is quite good and
deserves a close look.
On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 10:21 AM, Andrew Sorensen <aos@xxxxxxx> wrote:
I think its time we make some important decisions about the
installer
process, since it will effect other aspects about what we do.
we dont have any set way we have to do this yet, the rest
needs to be
designed on a few questions...
here are some choices for package/install format:
1)Livecd + squashfs (like ubuntu) the user boots a livecd, the
boot
process uses a squashfs on the cd as / tempfs, and boots. When
the user
installs the distro, the squashfs is uncompressed to the hard
disk, and
the installer program and unneeded things that were
uncompressed to disk
are removed, and the system config is setup..
advantages of this system are a fast install speed, cons are
that user
has to install everything from the squashfs, and remove what
they dont
need ;( (no choosing gnome vs kde here, unless you got another
cd...)
2)debian based installer (like debian-installer in debian)
this would simply install all the packages to the users target
system,
it will take much longer than the first install method,
however lets the
user choose just what they want to install.
3)some other setup (your ideas go here!)
if you know of a better way to do this, post here! if you got
some ideas
about making a new installer, post here as well!
I think with our mailing list you just gotta do Re: Installer
as subject
and precisionix-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxx as mailto, and it will
take it as
a reply.
--
The word 'politics' is derived from the word 'poly', meaning 'many',
and the word 'ticks', meaning 'blood sucking parasites'.
- Larry Hardiman
