https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=438451 Summary: Partitioner action redundency Product: openSUSE 11.1 Version: Beta 3 Platform: x86-64 OS/Version: SuSE Other Status: NEW Severity: Normal Priority: P5 - None Component: Installation AssignedTo: bnc-team-screening@forge.provo.novell.com ReportedBy: jpryor@novell.com QAContact: jsrain@novell.com Found By: --- The partitioner could use some extra "redundency" to make it easier to find actions and to remove extraneous tree navigation "work." After choosing to customize the partition setup, we enter the Expert Partitioner. The /linux node of the System View tree is selected, and Available Storage on linux is showing all partitions we can install to. 0. This looks quite nice, frankly. The problem is, "what should I do next"? There are no directions, instructions, or controls to indicate what should be done next aside from Help, Abort, Back, and Accept. 1. Remove "..." from all button labels, as they take up valuable space when you're on a 640x480 screen and then losing ~1/3 of that for the Preparation/Installation/Configuration section of the installer. 2. The Available Storage view should have a useful set of buttons listed, so that I don't have to go hunting throughout the tree to *find* what I want to do. This is an installer, executed at best once every 6-9 months, I'm NOT going to remember where everything is located, and "hunt-and-search" is NOT the best way to get people to do anything. Suggested default buttons include: Add, Edit, Resize, Delete, Expert The Add button could ask which drive to add a partition to as it's first question. Edit, Resize, Delete should do what would normally be done if you had instead double-clicked the parition (which shows Edit..., Resize..., and Delete... buttons). Expert could have such useful functionality as "Reread partitions." 3. When double-clicking a disk in the Available Storage screen (or from the /linux/Hard Disks System View node), I'm brought to a screen providing information about that drive, e.g. the /linux/Hard Disks/[/dev/sda] node. The default set of information shown is the Overview tab, which is ~useless. The default tab should be the Partitions tab, and the Paritions tab should have a description of how much free space if available (so that I don't need to flip between the Overview and Partitions tabs to determine how much free space is available). The same is true when selecting the e.g. /linux/Volume Management/[dev/system] (when using LVM) -- the default view is the Overview tb, which is ~useless, and just requires that we click yet another tab (Logical Volumes) in order to get anything done. 4. [minor] Do the wizards _really_ need to be full-page wizards? Couldn't they instead be "normal" dialogs? For example, from the "Hard Disk: /dev/sda" view it would be nice to be able to see what partitions already exist when going through the Add... wizard. 5. It's hard to find anything. This is where the previously mentioned redundency would be nice -- there should be more than one place to access some functionality. For example, re-reading partition tables: if I already had a useful partition setup that I wanted to reuse, it was ~trivial to do so under the 11.0 installer, it was under the Expert button. Now, I have to click throughout the System View tree to find the Hard Disks node's Rescan Disks button. Difficult? No. Annoying? Yes. 6. Consider workflow, and the number of buttons needed to get anything done. Suppose you already have a partition setup (from Rescan disks), and you want to assign appropriate mount points. Currently, you would: a. Go to the Available Storage screen (/linux node) b. Double-click a partition, such as /dev/sda1 c. Click the Edit... button and finish the wizard. d. Click the Available Storage screen [again]. e. Repeat b..d for each partition you're interested in. If the Available Storage screen had an Edit button, we could remove steps (b) and (d), saving two System View navigation steps which provide nothing but overhead. The same steps would need to be done for anything else that required Editing all partitions, such as setting the noatime mount option, or ensuring that extended user attributes were permitted, etc. In short, it's far too cumbersome to manipulate all partitions with the current GUI, and it could be improved significantly by just adding one button to the Available Storage screen. -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.