Re: Random bits about the graphical installer
Eduardo Silva wrote:
Hi all, I've thought a bit about the Debian's
graphical installer, and came to a few
opinions/conclusions, and want to share them with you.
In the end I link to two images of a possible gtk
interface I drawed, which could be shared by d-i gtk
and debconf gtk, with some differences (debconf
interface wouldn't have the "menu" option):
- The dialog interface of d-i is equal or very
simillar to the Dialog interface of debconf when
acessing through dpkg-reconfigure. This is good (and
obvious, since d-i uses debconf, right?), and gives
consistency to these Debian tools. Maybe the same can
be made for the gtk d-i and gtk debconf?
for sure uniformation would be good, but some more aspects of the
problem should be examinated to determine if it's possible or not.
- The constant progress bar is not necessary, because
when it is running, the interface is not interactive,
and when it is stoped, it isn't giving any
information. Having a persistant global installation
progress bar would be interesting, one that would show
the progress rate of the entire installation, but
perhaps that is not in the plans.
Therefore, I think it should follow dialog's
interface, have a separate screen with a center
progress bar and detailed progress info inside it and
general progress info below it.
I have to admin that having the progressbar displayed even if it's not
running it's not optimal, but When choosing what kernel to install it's
useful to have the progressbar indicating what percentage of progress
has been reached in installing both base system and kernel.
(something like https://debian.polito.it/downloads/gtk_last.png)
For sure the progressbar system will have to be revisitated somehow, and
if place it inside a popup window we'll have to rewrite not only a bit
of code.
On the global progressbar: this would be really useful: other people
agree on this but this is a hard thing to be implemented (see posts on
this ML some months ago)
- I think the d-i menu should exist in a screen of its
own, like it does now with d-i dialog interface.
Having it acessible all the time doesn't really give
you anything more than one less click to acess any of
it's options. (meaning, it doesn't give any usefull
information, like showing in which menu option the
user is currently at, what options have already been
configured and what are left to configure, etc.).
Right: the main-menu hack was introduced to both give the user
continuous overview of the main menu and an indication of where we are.
Maybe it was not a good idea eventually, but anyhow it can be disabled.
- Should the help text for each dialog always be
shown, or only if the user clicks a help button? On
the one hand, giving so much text for the installing
user to digest before each option may be a bit to
much; on the other hand, this problem could be
aliviated by improving the help text. For the
partition manager a separate help screen should exist,
though.
If the question is trivial we may not even give help to the user,
viceversa if the question is toght the user has to be supported.
This is pretty much related to the user's skills.
I've considered also using tooltips to display extended descriptions,
but after some experiments i ended up considering the textarea to be a
better solution.
Anyway some questions lack of extended descriptions and others still
need to be localized...
- No vertical aligned text or icons please! I looked
at the recent snapshot of gtk d-i and there was a
Debian gnu/linux logo in vertical position on the
left. It is less readable, and forces a user to turn
his head to the left (or his laptop to the right :))
to fully understand it. Even if we can all turn the
image just by rotating it with the software in our
brains, it's still cumbersome.
Ok, i'm no artist at all: i just wanted to place something nice inside
an all-gray screen: help on artwork would be very apreciated :)
The images I drawed are
http://www.geocities.com/jobezone/xserver-xorg.png
http://www.geocities.com/jobezone/debconf.png
really nice images!
Sorry, they are in portuguese, but the specific text
content is not the point, so the better! They are
debconf questions, and the first will eventually be
asked to the user by d-i if he installs X.
I have placed the help text of each question directly
above the choices, but it could also be cut out, and
acessible through a help button. I've also added a
YES/NO choice to xserver-xorg instead of gtk debconf's
usage of a checkbox.
This is a good idea, but using GTKTreeView even for multiselect
questions would require some efforts.
I have also reused the ideia from gtk debconf of a top
color bar containing the title and Debian's logo on
the top right. I've just changed the color to be
Debian's red (so it wouldn't follow the theme's color)
and put the Debian logo in a white background.
These images are mostly design ideas, and are not
perfectly pixel-spaced. I hope to later do some more
graphics which would show how the progress bar screen
could be (similar to Dialog's), and the Menu (also
similar to Dialog's).
There are some problems that have forced me doing things as i did
- Some extended description are VERY long, so placing them above the
question would put it in the bottom area of the screen and the vertical
starting point of a question would change depending on the expended
description's lenght.
Because of this extended description are better to be placed under the
question itself, but maybe they should have a fixed height.
Placing them inside a modal popup window that shows up when pressing on
"Help" could be an idea, but then we should make sure each question has
an apropriate extended description in order not to left the popup window
blank.
And note also that until also boolean and multiselect question are not
displayed by a GtkTreeView (other work to do) we'll have to use a scroll
to encapsulate them.
ATM i'm concentrating on making the FE fully functional, even if not
nice as it could be, and this because having a complete GTKDFB
environement woking and packaged the proper way, along with
international fonts, is the main prerequisite to start building
graphical netinst CD images.
Anyway some realy good artwork is needed for sure to make the frontend
prettier after it becomes stable: so keep on experimenting since your
contribution is very welcomed ;)
ciao
attilio
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