Martin Schmidkunz wrote:
Hi,
after agreeing with you many times, that our partitioning module needs some facelift, I have created some mockups how this could look like:
Hi, First of all, I have to say that partitioning is IMAO impossible to do without Wizards if we want to cover both use cases - newbies and IT administrators. There are so many tasks that user needs to/can do when installing a system on a disk, or even installing a second system (already installed Windows), which is a very common use-case, that we just can't do everything from one (or) two dialogs. In my opinion, the very first dialogs should a selection of use cases, defined by what partitioner finds on the current disk e.g.: (x) I want to shrink Windows installation and use the free space for openSUSE installation ( ) I want to use all disks for openSUSE system ... ( ) I want to run an expert partitioner Partitioner needs more than a face-lifting, it needs good wizards that helps you to do very difficult task in a few very simple tasks. Common user doesn't need to know even what a hard disk is and how it looks like. People want to use our system, they don't want to install it more than once and not all of them "want to learn more" ;) BTW: I've attached some screen-shots from Ubuntu installation 6.06. Just to add some more ideas into the Partitioner Ein Topf :) To be honest, I wouldn't understand this overcrowded dialog very well: http://en.opensuse.org/Image:20052007_partitioner_redesign.png
The module would be divided into two tabs: * basic partitioning * Logical Volumes (maybe Logical Volumes Management (LVM) would be more appropriate)
The "basic partitioning" tab provides:
* An overview table with informations about hard discs and their partitions (as far as I understood Ihno there are plans to exchange the device names (hda, hdb) with the device ID, so I try to do this already in this mockup) * search for hard discs (might be cool for environments with lots of hard discs) * filter to display e.g. only active hard discs * an action area in the second half of the module where the user can work on the partitions without having to click an extra add/edit/delete button; the current mock-up shows the action area when the user clicks on an unallocated disc space.
When doing such a complicated task as creating new partition or resizing some old one definitely is, it's better to provide enough additional information that wouldn't fit into one dialog (for all such cases together). We really need to provide textual help for such tasks to make users understand what they do and why... Pop-up windows do the job very well, just as Partition Magic or Ubuntu already do.
I thought about displaing a graphical overview, but I rejected that idea for the following reasons:
* no additional information to the table overview * might be suitable for desktop environments but not in an environment where there are many partitions to manage which can be formated with many different file systems * the target audience (sys admins) prefer numbers to graphics * useless in textmode * needs quite a lot of space
I think, that most of the mock-up should be instantly clear, I just want to mention some points:
I wouldn't be so strict about not-displaying the graphical overview. Sure, IT administrators wouldn't probably need it, but a common use with, let's say, maximally three disks would love it. One picture can tell more than a thousand words... I don't, of course, want to discourage you, just, please, think about it in the way we need to make newbies understand also to prevent from data-loss. -- Lukas Ocilka, YaST Developer (xn--luk-gla45d) ----------------------------------------------------------------- SUSE LINUX, s. r. o., Lihovarska 1060/12, Praha 9, Czech Republic