[opensuse-factory] Small usability comment on YaST2 installer
Hi, Last weekend I gave a openSUSE 11.0 Alpha3 disk to a friend and made him install openSUSE... I tried to follow a bit what he did and where issues were. The biggest thing I've seen that he was to much attracted by the green next button, even though the system was busy and next not available (like on first screen, when system is initializing.. the next button is green and as there is nothing else, it's very attractive to click it... ). Otherwise he was not that much worried by the installation... except: the first user he wanted to create, as a typical windows user, he wanted to name it Admin... ;) but even that's a valid user... The partition proposal was a bit weird... he had a 40GB disk, 20GB filled with windows.. openSUSE suggested to delete windows and use the whole disk... of course *I* would agree to this.. he was not really pleased. Dominique --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org
On Tue 08 Apr 2008 22:12:25 NZST +1200, Dominique Leuenberger wrote:
The partition proposal was a bit weird... he had a 40GB disk, 20GB filled with windows.. openSUSE suggested to delete windows and use the whole disk... of course *I* would agree to this.. he was not really pleased.
I've been using suse for almost 10 years now, and the only times I didn't need to enter the expert partitioning to do everything by hand was when installing on a completely blank disk when the partitioning didn't really matter. I.e. almost never. For the cases 1) Leave an existing Other OS untouched, use the remaining unused partitions. 2) Leave an existing Linux 1 untouched but install in whatever way over Linux 2, with or without modifying the partition table. 3) Leave everything untouched, but install into 1 existing partition and reuse an existing swap partition. Do NOT modify the partition table. the proposal was always to smash the disk and therefore no good. I gave up on this myself years ago, but if we're discussing how to make this more user-friendly, my suggestion would be to make partitioning suggestions aligned with *what the user wants to do*, perhaps aided by a modicum of intelligence, and not centered around a graphical fdisk. That is, have a short list of 3-5 different use cases like * Keep OtherOS, install into a non-otherOS partition(s), either with or without smashing up the remaining partition(s). This should be default if an ntfs partition is found early on the disk. * Install into existing Linux partitions, do not alter partition sizes. A simple tabular assignment of partitions to filesystem locations, mostly / and swap, perhaps /usr/local, without the whole fdisk shebang would benefit those with less experience as well as me when I have to talk partition assignments over the phone. * Install into partition to be specified, use existing swap partition, do not alter partition sizes, create boot entries for all other OSes found (competition ones or not). * Ask which partitions to keep, treat all others as blank. * Treat whole disk as blank. This should be default if disk is in fact blank. Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org
participants (2)
-
Dominique Leuenberger -
Volker Kuhlmann