Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Hedayat Vatankhah]

  Hi,

/*Luya Tshimbalanga <luya at fedoraproject.org>*/ wrote on 10/15/2010 
6:06:10 AM +0350:
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> On 11/10/10 03:41 AM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>> I installed and played with Ubuntu 10.10 over the weekend (in a VM),
>> and I have to say that their installer is very smooth indeed. It's
>> starting to make anaconda look distinctly clunky.
>>
>> Some of the things it does which are IMHO better:
>>
>> - starts disk formatting / copying / installing in parallel
>> with asking user questions
>>
>> - downloads updates in parallel too
>>
>> - uses IP geolocation to guess the user's timezone and keyboard
>> settings (it's been 100% correct for me each time)
>>
>> - suggests a username and hostname based on the user's real name
>> (Mac OS X's installer also does this -- it's a nice touch)
>>
>> This is in contrast to anaconda (certainly from the live CD install)
>> which seems to be a usability no-go area.
>>
>> Thoughts? Can we switch to their installer?
>>
>> Rich.
>>
> Looking at the installation and the documentation of Ubuntu 10.10, the
> outside looks nice but the functionality is very lacking as pointed out
> on many posts. AFAIK, Ubuntu installer does not have the ability to
> customize installation for use needs as highlighted and can be only done
> offline. I don't know if there are installer from live media that
> provide more control about package to install other than extracting the
> bundled applications.
>
> What anaconda needs is more refinement and polishing as majority of
> function are already in place (has the team solved issue about multiple
> boot bug  or recognition of other installed distributions>).
>
> To answer the question: don't switch to that new installer.
I completely agree. I've never heard any of the users who prefer Ubuntu 
to complain about the mentioned problems with the Fedora's installer. 
While those features are nice to have, but it's not hard for users to 
live with them at all. The only thing that I've seen that some 
(specially novice) users prefer about the Ubuntu installer is the 
ability to install from the Windows environment and it's ability to 
install Ubuntu "inside" a Windows partition without requiring to change 
hard disks partitioning (IIRC the old RedHat had this feature for 
sometime).
I was also proud of Anaconda's features, and hardly against reducing its 
feature set. Looking for new users should not make us forgetting current 
Fedora users. There is some reason that the current Fedora users has not 
switched to Ubuntu; but if you make things more and more like Ubuntu the 
current users will look somewhere else to find what they want.

For example, I do lots of Fedora installations, but I rarely do a normal 
install. On my own ThinkPad X61 I use hard disk installation (it doesn't 
have any DVD/CD drives), and for others I usually do an HTTP install 
from my laptop. (Installing from live medias or BFO installation methods 
are simply a No-Go for me because of the required during-install or 
after-install bandwidth).
Also, from time to time I do organize some competitions in which I 
should install Linux on many systems, and so I do an HTTP install to 
install in parallel. In my case, being able to do a hard disk install 
from an NTFS partition (which worked fine in F13 but doesn't work in 
F14, and it was never officially supported) is much much more important 
(as I don't have any non-lvm ext partitions and FAT partitions have been 
long gone from hard disks!) than the mentioned features.

Another thing which hits me is being forced to customizing package list 
always: if you select "Software Development" as the software you need, 
you cannot select any other option in the new Anacondas; and in its 
default selection there is no Office suits, no media applications and 
even it doesn't select Eclipse (I wonder if most of software developers 
do not use office and sound/video applications!). So, I'm forced to 
customize the package selection.

IMHO, the features I mentioned provide more than a little faster 
installation or guessing user's timezone.

Good luck,
Hedayat

>
> - -- 
> Luya Tshimbalanga
> Graphic&  Web Designer
> E: luya at fedoraproject.org
> W: http://www.thefinalzone.net
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