Re: debian installation

[Justin Wells <jread@semiotek.com>]

OK, enough people have reacted with "I like the whirling gears"
that I retract that portion of my earlier comments, but still insist
on these three things:

   1. Debian should have an "express" install option which assumes 
      that 90% of its defaults are going to be ok, thereby avoiding
      most of the questions asked during the install (and not asking
      you to press enter after some information is printed). 

      A "custom" install option would still be available that would 
      ask you all of the questions all the time, which is what the 
      current version does--so you could choose that if you like it,
      or choose "express" if you are in a hurry.

   2. Debian should ask questions only at the start of the install, 
      and at the end, and do all the downloading, unpacking, and 
      configuring as one big batch job that doesn't require the 
      user to be present (Debian currently does the downloading as 
      one big batch; it should do the installing as part of the
      same batch job.)

      In order to do this, Debian would ask a carefully selected set of
      questions in advance, so that it would have all the answers it
      needs for a typical install of the stable release. For unstable,
      this list might not be totally up to date, so it may have to 
      fall back and ask something; and if you installed something 
      atypical, that might happen as well.

   3. All those informational messages that are printed and then
      Debian says "Press Enter" should be appended to an "install
      messages" text file, and that file should be displayed to
      you at the end of the install (and saved for later review,
      since those messages sometimes ask you to do something).

Since people like the whirling gears, and seem to dislike the status
bars other OS's print, OK--I don't really care either way, and I guess
you can probably learn a lot by watching it. 

But I still want the install to be less time consuming (meaning less
of my time, the batch processing can take all night if necessary).

Justin



On Mon, Aug 23, 1999 at 06:58:46PM +0200, Martin Uecker wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 22, 1999 at 10:44:48PM -0600, Nathan Duehr wrote:
> 
> [...]
>  
> > I learned a lot during my first Debian installs by watching what was going
> > on and being required to be awake, alert, and involved in the process of
> > installation via questions asked by the installation scripts.  I can't say
> 
> [...]
> 
> But being forced to watch debian compiling elisp byte code during the
> installation isn´t fun. (especially on a not-so-fast 486)
> 
> 
> -- 
> Not that I have anything much against redundancy.  But I said that already.
>              -- Larry Wall in <199702271735.JAA04048@wall.org>
> 
> 
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