[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Bug#720989: marked as done (www.debian.org: unexperienced users fail to download installation media especially for usb drives)

Your message dated Wed, 4 Oct 2023 11:10:39 +0200
with message-id <[🔎] 20231004111039.7e8d01b159628076ee2c3b9a@mailbox.org>
and subject line Re: Bug#720989: closing
has caused the Debian Bug report #720989,
regarding www.debian.org: unexperienced users fail to download installation media especially for usb drives
to be marked as done.

This means that you claim that the problem has been dealt with.
If this is not the case it is now your responsibility to reopen the
Bug report if necessary, and/or fix the problem forthwith.

(NB: If you are a system administrator and have no idea what this
message is talking about, this may indicate a serious mail system
misconfiguration somewhere. Please contact owner@bugs.debian.org
immediately.)


-- 
720989: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=720989
Debian Bug Tracking System
Contact owner@bugs.debian.org with problems
--- Begin Message --- 
Package: www.debian.org
Severity: normal
Control: blocks -1 by 575760

The question of how to download installation media for Debian is a
recurring question on ask.debian.net:

http://ask.debian.net/questions/what-image-do-i-download
http://ask.debian.net/questions/problem-installing-with-mini-iso
http://ask.debian.net/questions/iso-files-on-download-site
http://ask.debian.net/questions/i-can-t-download-any-kind-of-debian-installers
http://ask.debian.net/questions/what-about-all-those-dvds

I didn't believe this to be a problem until it came up repeatedly. Then
I started doing user interface testing by tasking clueless users to
install Debian. Here is my results from two of those sessions:

In both sessions the users immediately skipped all links containing "CD"
or "DVD", because the target hardware was not capable of handling such
media. It was only much later that they realized that these images is
actually what they needed. Updating the name or adding a short
explanation for USB would improve this situation a lot.

One user was overwhelmed by the available choices and figured that he'd
need to read the installation manual and quickly found the relevant
link. Great. Only then he had no clue about which architecture to
choose. The list is given without any explanations. Some guidance such
as "if unsure choose amd64", would help a lot. This sub-issue is also
known as #575760.

He was then confused by the detail of the installation manual. When
looking for how to equip his usb media he found explanations on what usb
media is (section 2.4.2). He did not expect this low level of
explanations after being required to do the architecture selection.

A few times he was amused and confused by the German translation and
wording. "Spiegel" (mirror) is not a widely used word neither in the
technical nor the non-technical communities. The language used appeared
unusual to him.

The other user was well aware of what architectures are. However when he
clicked on the relevant architecture from
http://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst he was confused about the
directory listing at
http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/dists/wheezy/main/installer-amd64/current/images/,
because he didn't remember to read the MANIFEST file.

All these issues show that obtaining installation media for Debian is a
non-trivial task. I hope that this report can help with improving the
situation.

Helmut

--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message --- 
Hi,

Thomas Lange <lange@cs.uni-koeln.de> wrote (Tue, 3 Oct 2023 08:27:01 +0200):
> Hi,
> 
> I think in the meantime we improved the situation a lot.
> On our startpage we now have a direct link to an ISO (we do no call
> it CD image any more) and we have a link to other images
> (this is https://www.debian.org/distrib/) which is much cleaner
> than before. It would be nice to update the german translations
> https://www.debian.org/distrib/index.de.html
> but then this bug should be closed.

Translation updated; closing this bug


-- 
Holger Wansing <hwansing@mailbox.org>
PGP-Fingerprint: 496A C6E8 1442 4B34 8508  3529 59F1 87CA 156E B076

--- End Message ---
Reply to: