Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Gerd Hoffmann]

On 10/11/10 19:31, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 11:41:13 +0100,
>    "Richard W.M. Jones"<rjones at redhat.com>  wrote:
>>
>> Some of the things it does which are IMHO better:
>>
>>   - starts disk formatting / copying / installing in parallel
>>     with asking user questions
>
> I think that is a misfeature. I don't want anything irreversible to be done
> until I say go.

I always liked the way suse does the install.  It comes up with a 
*single* overview screen showing *everything* it suggests to do 
(partitioning, packages to install, some basic settings, ...).  Then you 
can go and change stuff if you want, and after changing settings it goes 
back to the overview screen, showing what it would do now after applying 
your changes. This way you are not bothered with lots of interactive 
questions but still have the option to change everything as you like if 
you want.  When you are happy with everything you say 'go!' and it goes. 
It doesn't touch your hard disk before.

Anaconda goes though everything step-by-step instead, asking one 
question after another, doing some work inbetween (partitining), asking 
more questions (packages to install) ...

Dunno how hard it would be to change anaconda to have such an overview 
screen.  Maybe it isn't *that* hard after all as we have kickstart.  So 
for a interactive install anaconda could collect all info from the user, 
compile a kickstart file from that, then feed the install machinery with 
the just-generated kickstart file.

Anaconda can try to figure reasonable defaults.  Using geoip. By 
inspecting the hardware.  Have 'klick here to change' buttons to change 
things, which can probably handled by the existing screens for timezone 
/ keyboard / ... selection.  Maybe even reading stuff from a kickstart 
file and present it in the overview, so you could stick your favorite 
non-default settings there.

cheers
   Gerd