Re: Installation
"Weaver" <weaver@riseup.net> writes:
> On Thu, September 13, 2012 12:04 pm, lee wrote:
>>
>> What do you do, or what is the installer supposed to do, when you have
>> several disks? Make a RAID-0 out of them and do as you describe? Make
>> a RAID-1 or RAID-10 or RAID-5? Only use one disk? Put / and everything
>> else on one disk and use the other(s) (one) for /home?
>>
>> I can see you saying that your clueless user doesn't have more than one
>> disk.
>
> In the majority of cases, they won't, having bought an OEM installed box,
> where the manufacturer has kept the price down with a minimum of hardware.
When they have that, they will very likely have windoze on a single hard
disk on a single partition. Do you want the D/i to shrink this
partition? If so, have the users make a backup first.
Who says that this is a the majority of cases? And who says it matters?
What you haven't thought about is that the D/i has to be able to work
with all kinds of different hardware. You don't want to think about
anything that might be different from how you assume things are because
it gets in your way.
> What about the clueless user who scraped together their computer
>> over time from old or cheap parts they were able to acquire, so they
>> have a couple of old SCSI and IDE disks between 16, 36 and 100GB in
>> size. They've got an OS they want to keep on the 100GB IDE disk, which
>> is partitioned (someone else did it and they don't know how to change
>> that), some data on the others, all partitions between 60--90% full with
>> non-removable stuff, and now they want to try out Debian. They are in
>> the installer and expect it to install without partitioning
>> manually. What's the installer supposed to do or to offer them?
>
> Why do you create scenarios that are overly complex?
They aren't overly complex. They are realistic. I installed Linux on
something like the above when I installed it the first time, only that
disk sizes were still in the MB range and you could only dream of a disk
that would have the incredible capacity of 1GB. Of course, you didn't
have internet and might not even have heard about it, and even if you
did, you wouldn't have had access to it. It was a computer I had bought
pre-built from a manufacturer and upgraded over time. That's one of the
nice things about this kind of computers: You can modify them easily.
Why do you expect that people just go and buy exactly the hardware you
want them to have before using the D/i? It is unlikely that they
will.
You said you had old crappy computers when you started. Didn't you take
out the disks (and other useful parts) and put them into the next one
when you switched to make the next crappy computer a bit less crappy by
upgrading it? Or even only to keep your data?
Well, maybe not, I can imagine you dumped the old one when you got the
next one and started thinking about keeping your data not before it was
too late. Wake up, not everyone does things the way you do.
--
Debian testing amd64
Reply to: