Installer: 32 vs. 64 bit

[Juliusz Chroboczek <jch@irif.fr>]

Hi,

I've been encouraging my students to install Debian on their personal
machines, and we've found out that a lot of them get the wrong Debian
installer:

  - some of them attempt to install an AMD64 version of Debian in
    a 32-bit-only virtual machine;
  - others attempt to install an i386 version on 64-bit hardware.

In both cases, the installer crashes with no useful error message (in the
former case, it crashes just after installing grub, in the latter case, it
crashes straight away).  This is a bad user experience, since the students
lose a lot of time trying to work out the issue on their own before they
ask for an appointment, and end up with the impression that installing
Debian "never works".

Could somebody please speak with the installer people so they make sure
that the installation fails with a friendly user message in both of the
cases outlined above?

Thanks,

-- Juliusz Chroboczek