Re: d-i vs openSUSE's ancient installer
On Fri, Sep 02, 2011 at 02:42:50PM -0500, Don Wright wrote:
> I understand that, and did not take it as flaming. I even share a
> preference for 'parallel' setup screens as opposed to 'serial'
> questions, but understand some of the constraints of D-I make this more
> difficult, such as the limited space on a "businesscard" image or the
> performance penalty of a screen refresh over a serial link.
>
> All Linux has much more in common as family than with other operating
> systems, or even different releases from the same company. However, when
> you come into the locker room of a football team and express admiration
> for another team, you should expect some 'trash talk' about their
> weaknesses as well.
>
> Mostly I replied because the Debian Project (which includes Debian
> Installer) seems to have many goals and constraints that other distros
> have not shared. This leads to design choices for the installer that
> make it appear less sophisticated in the eyes of some reviewers, and
> public opinion about Debian has suffered from that. The fact that
> installing Linux is increasingly a one-time event for many distros has
> been lost amid much discussion of how to make this one-time event look
> good to users of other operating systems, especially those where reboot,
> reinstall, replace is common.
>
> Over the years I have watched D-I go through a gradual process of
> continuous improvement, and certainly expect more changes in the future.
> The graphical installer interface, which improved support for some
> languages and managed to consolidate a few prompts, is one example. If a
> better presentation can be arranged without hurting the capabilities I
> mentioned earlier, I'm sure that will be tested and accepted as such
> contributions have been in the past.
I wonder how the suse installer would get along with brltty or a screen
reader.
And d-i certainly works quite well, certainly much nicer than
boot-floppies used to be (especially when it came to trying to modify
the code).
The one thing I remember from using the suse installer once a number of
years ago was that doing a netinstall it had no ftp servers or anything
listed. The user had to look that up themselves and type it in. What a
pain that was.
--
Len Sorensen
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