Comments on installation process

From: Peter Becker (pbecker@meganesia.int.gu.edu.au)
Date: Sun Mar 25 2001 - 02:39:02 PST

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    Message-ID: <3ABDCAC6.4060204@meganesia.int.gu.edu.au>
Date: Sun, 25 Mar 2001 20:39:02 +1000
From: Peter Becker <pbecker@meganesia.int.gu.edu.au>
Subject: Comments on installation process

    Hello,

    here are some comments on my experience with the installation process
    (is there some email address at SuSE for this -- I didn't find anything
    suitable on their website):

    1) it worked pretty nice for me and I am impressed how much worked
    automatically. It looks very nice, even compared to the different
    Windows setups -- maybe the resolution used was a little bit too high,
    some things looked quite lost on the big screen. Is the I386 setup as
    good in detecting stuff?

    2) some things irritated me a little:
    - the setup works through the points in a wizard-style, but when it
    comes to printer/sound/network this is broken.
    - on the screen mentioned above I lacked some feedback if sound/network
    is running
    - the network setup should be in front of the printer setup since the
    latter offers to install network printers
    - even if I knew that a JetDirect print spooler should work as "TCP/IP
    redirect" (was this the name?) I'd guess that some people would have
    problems with the term -- wouldn't it be more useful to put the term
    "printserver" into the option? What about scanning for the printers
    first and when some where found asking the user which he wants to use?
    Maybe even offering a list of checkboxes to install more than one?
    - the list of tasks (1,2,..,8) is nice, but I would prefer if they would
    be on some timescale -- the installation task takes very long. Maybe the
    reboot could be marked somewhere. (I know that guessing the remaining
    time is hard but in this case I think giving at least some idea of how
    long it takes would be nice).
    - since we have to use a http-proxy here I lacked a "use proxy" option
    in the network setup. Of course this can be configured later but
    configuring this on setup would be nicer :-)

    3) A thing I always wonder why nobody does this: wouldn't it be useful
    to have two or three threads in the setup? After the partitions are
    choosen the computer has a lot of stuff to do _and_ has to ask a lot of
    question, which means a lot of waiting in a sequential installation.
    Wouldn't it be nice if those two things can be done at one time? The
    third thread would be some preparation thread, e.g. the "look for
    network printers" task described above -- these tasks have to be run
    before the user is asked, so it might be useful to put them into an
    additional thread (and they often need different ressources than the
    installation tasks). But probably I miss some problems with this,
    otherwise someone would have done it already :-)

    Just my 2c of course (and thanks for the great distribution),

       Peter

    PS: something I'd like to have in a running system is more control on
    services from a high viewpoint. For example I'd like to turn HTTPD
    on/off with just a switch, maybe even with the option of
    installing/deinstalling the required packages. And this should be done
    in one central configuration for the most important services running
    either as daemons or via inetd. For a server I am happy with doing all
    this myself but since we have no central distribution system for the
    workstations I'd be happy to have some "turn this off" buttons :-)

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