Hi, This is a quasi-install report. I helped a friend from Uni install Debian on his laptop (an NEC Versa M320) using the beta3 CD. He did most of the install, I wanted to observe from a useability perspective. He had pretty much no prior Linux knowledge. The install itself went really well. An observation was that when the laptop was warm booted from Windows XP, it hung completely when the e100 module was installed, both during hardware detection and after installation. Must be some hardware bug. About the only useability thing was during base-config, when he was prompted to enter the name of a user to create, he expected what he typed to overwrite the "Debian User" default value, whereas one has to backspace over it first. Not sure if this behaviour is something easily changed. It was the first time I'd attempted the automatic partitioning with a disk that had some free space, and it "just worked" and was really cool. How is the ratio between the root partition and the /home partition determined? I forget how much free space we made available for the install, but I did notice that the root partition was something like 5G big, and the /home was 13G. For a laptop with a single user, I would have given a tad more space for installing software. I'd be surprised if he gets anywhere near filling 13G with user data. regards Andrew
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