Hi Nayden, hi list,
I have done a ton of installations of SUSE and I basically see 4 different cases :
I think, you gave a good summary of possible installation scenarios. I would rather merge topic 3. (SUSE on the disc) and 4. (another Linux on the disc) and ask the user at the beginning of the installation: "Hey, we have detected another version of SUSE on your machine. Do you want to upgrade this installation or do you want to make a clean installation?" (well, of course we have to go through the wording, but it is just an example :-))
1. Clean disk - the installer prompts : /swap / /home
Makes a lot of sense to me.
Without explanations to the end-user why we propose it in this way (or maybe just a small one :-)
Some explanations will be required to explain this scheme to user who are not familiar with partitioning. Maybe with tool tips? Or some short lines?
2. Windows on the disk : First prompt could be: Do you want to preserve or remove the existing Windows installation ? With two choices which lead to different templates.
In case the user wants to keep her Windows, our installer copes perfectly with everything BUT the user is not able to decide how much she wants to shrink the partition. Our script can tell them for example : "the partition is 30% used" and show them a bar where they see what's used and on which they can move/choose visually how much they want to free for Linux (hopefully a 100% ;-). AFAIK from my experience, this is done in an arbitrary way now (at least from an user perspective).
And the user needs to point at the place where to install the Linux :-) Interestingly our tests with Linux Newbies showed, that they can`t cope with the Ubuntu partitioning during the installation either. I thnk, we should provide some recommended suggestions as well (based on the user`s package selection).
3. SUSE on the disk: a/ upgrade the existing SUSE installation - automatically use the same / for the system, /swap and /home in the way they exist WITHOUT formatting /home, but later during user-creation automatically change the owner (in case the same user-name is created)
Expecially the aspect: WITHOUT formatting is vital!
5. Advanced + Partition Resizing :
In all cases there should be a possibility to switch to advanced partitioning without our "templates" where a skilled user could do what they would like to do (as it is currently).
I agree with that.
In this advanced options I would create a partition-resizing dialog with the help of which an user can easily resize any partition of choice - no matter if it is a LINUX or a WINDOWS partition. I have always lacked such a feature in the SUSE installer.
Yes, we should do that.
What do you think ?
I think you have some very good ideas and I would be happy, if you continue working with us on the partitioner :-) I just have to ask you for some patience in advance, because it might take some time for me to respond mails and to work on the ideas! Enjoy, Martin -- Martin Schmidkunz User Experience Specialist martin.schmidkunz@novell.com +49 (0) 911 740 53-346 ------------------------------------- SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) ------------------------------------- Novell, Inc. SUSE® Linux Enterprise 10 Your Linux is ready http://www.novell.com/linux -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-ux+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-ux+help@opensuse.org