Re: bad press at www.linuxworld.com
Well, I would be willing to agree with almost anyone who says that our
install sucks. Almost every screen has some cryptic comment that makes
sense to me, because I understand the context, but must be pure greek to
anyone not so familiar.
However, my biggest complaint has never been addressed as far as I can
tell, and it is really hard to explain over the phone just why you are
doing any of this:
When installing from a CD, after picking the CD as the installation media,
the install keeps asking you where to find the (rescue, drivers, or
base) disks on your CD. None of these questions should ever be asked. I
don't know whether you will find them in the default location or a list,
and I certainly don't know how to specify it manually. The manual
specification is even more problematical when the install scripts insist
on tacking an additional path element to the one provided, and failing.
Why should the user even be involved in any of these questions. It's on
the CD. If the installation program doesn't find it in the
"default" location (/instmnt/debian/dists/stable/main/disks-i386/current
for the Intel install), then it should do a find on /instmnt, and only if
it fails to find the desired files should it then tell the user that it
can't find the desired files. Asking for the manual path to these files
doesn't seem to be useful at all. If you can't find the files you need on
the CD with find, then they just aren't there!
Needless to say, you could put them somewhere else, but then you shouldn't
have chosen cdrom as the installation method for these files!
Anyway this is my current rant on boot disk issues. I've had to deal with
several confused and frustrated users over this issue. It was even worse
for one of the "pre-release stable" CDs where this feature didn't work no
matter what you entered, and several people got "stuck" with these.
On all those other screens where an option is available for some archane
or out of date machine, just think SIMPLER IS BETTER. Fitting the install
to all the possible archaic machines in existance is a design of
deminishing returns on invested efforts. KISS (Keep It Simple
Stupid) should apply at every opportunity.
Luck,
Dwarf
--
_-_-_-_-_- Author of "The Debian Linux User's Guide" _-_-_-_-_-_-
aka Dale Scheetz Phone: 1 (850) 656-9769
Flexible Software 11000 McCrackin Road
e-mail: dwarf@polaris.net Tallahassee, FL 32308
_-_-_-_-_-_- See www.linuxpress.com for more details _-_-_-_-_-_-_-
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