Easier installer?

[Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org>]

Hi,

At $DAYJOB I'm currently supporting a piece of software for which I
provide binary packages for a number of distributions. As part of that,
I find myself having to install a Fedora or CentOS VM occasionally.

I can't help but notice that their current installer is extremely easy
to use; and that, as compared to ours, it seems like a huge step
forwards:

- First screen of the installer allows to select a language
- Second screen has three sections: "Localisation" (which has a button
  for selecting the keyboard layout, one for language support allowing
  to select additional languages, and one for time/date settings),
  "Software" (with a button for the installation source and their
  equivalent of tasksel), and "System" (which has a button for their
  partitioner and one for the network configuration)
- The partitioner defaults to "automatic partitioning", but you have to
  enter it and confirm it by selecting the proper hard disk (presumably
  so you can't accidentally overwrite your data)
- Once you make the correct settings in that screen, you click on "Start
  installation". The next screen will cause the actual installation to
  start (i.e., the installer will partition & format hard disks, start
  downloading packages, and install them). It also has two buttons for
  user settings (you can enter a root password and/or create a non-root
  user).

... and that's it.

I think that their installer is much easier to use for inexperienced
users than is ours, and that we should take a good look at what they've
done and see if we can make improvements to ours so that it would
support a similar experience. That doesn't have to mean we need to
completely rewrite our installer; e.g., we could write a udeb which asks
the user as many questions as possible without moving on, and then uses
preseeding to preset settings for the current udebs. Such an installer
wouldn't support *every* use case, but that's fine; since, in essence,
we'd just be providing an alternate UI to the same installer, people who
need some of the more advanced options can ditch the hand-holding UI and
switch to the advanced UI. We could add a button "skip this screen" to
make that easier, if needs be.

Thoughts?

-- 
Could you people please use IRC like normal people?!?

  -- Amaya Rodrigo Sastre, trying to quiet down the buzz in the DebConf 2008
     Hacklab