[Mageia-dev] 3.0 release - some initial notes; failure

[Liam R E Quin]

On Tue, 2013-01-08 at 13:41 +0200, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> Hi Liam,
> 
> let me reply to your E-mail - not necessarily disagreeing.

Thanks!
> 
> On Mon, 07 Jan 2013 02:46:39 -0500
> Liam R E Quin <liam at holoweb.net> wrote:
> 
> > Tried installing 3.0 beta over a Mandriva Cooker system today.
> > Mageia-3-beta1-x86_64-DVD.iso
> 
> Can Mandriva Cooker be upgraded to Mageia 3? I don't think it can be (due to
> Mandriva's switch to rpm5). Or do you mean you reformatted the relevant
> partitions and installed a new system?

It's a fresh install, sorry for not being clear.

[...]

> > On boot, there was a long delay followed by "Loading program" and a
> > progress bar appearing and disappearing again almost before I had time
> > to read the message. This didn't seem optimal.
> 
> I see. What are your system's specifications? I think I usually install from a
> CD (just to have a working system) and then install more packages using urpmi. I
> am downloading the DVD .iso now and will try it in a VirtualBox VM later to see
> if I can reproduce any problems.

It's several years old, HP Media Center m7680n with 8G of RAM,
Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 2.1GHz, DDR2 533MHz memory.

> > Choice of keyboard - there was a link to wikipedia in the Help text, but
> > it gave me an error that there was no network. There are two entries for
> > US Keyboard with no obvious reason, and a third for US International
> > (which I chose since I'm not in the US :-)) 
> 
> Sounds like a bug or at least a problem in the installer. Can you file a bug
> for it on https://bugs.mageia.org/ ?
> 
> > 
> > I have 2 disk drives. the installer wanted to use the spare space on my
> > Windows drive, when the other drive already had Linux. Yes, I could
> > choose from the drop-down, but it wasn't clear that I was choosing where
> > to put Mageia. Suggest add,
> > Multiple disk drives found. Choose which one you want to use for the
> > main Mageia system.
> 
> Sounds like a good enhancement.
> 
> > 
> > The disk was formatted. That was actually what I wanted, in this case,
> > but please add a warning that data will be lost - most humans on the
> > planet won't know that.
> 
> Yes, true. Of course, you cannot expect your users to read:
> 
> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000062.html

No, but Mageia Linux's installer is obviously primarily intended at the
experienced or dedicated hobbyist or the experienced system
administrator.

Long term, Magiea needs of course to target (1) people new to Linux,
whether or not they are new to computers in general, and (2) programmers
and packagers, to keep the distribution and community alive, whether or
not they are administrators.  This double-headed focus was a lot of the
success of Mandrake Linux and in fact led to a response from Red Hat -
Fedora.


> > There's no indication of how long the formatting will take, 
[...]
> > Suggest progress bar or at least some quotes from Moliére.
> 
> Heh. Well, formatting normally did not take too long for me, at least not in
> its fast formatting mode. But maybe a progress bar will be doable.

I said yes to doing a block scan.

> Oh, bad block scan. :-(. It should be displayed in the graphical installer.
Yes.


> > I'm assuming the graphics and ugly font are not final. If they are, the
> > pink stripes look like an error. Maybe caused by running my monitor
> > (1920x1200/"deep colour") in 800x600 16-bit mode.
> 
> I'll see if it happens to me in the installer.
> 
> > 
> > The long list of packages being installed - would be nicer to show the
> > name of the current package, and its description, and more slowly to
> > show a more detailed description of just one program.
> 
> By default the installer does not display the names of the packages installed I
> think - just a progress bar.
I don't think I did anything special to get the list of packages, but
maybe.

> > If there was a clear and obvious option to choose the LCD's native
> > resolution, a font like Matthew Carter's Bitstream Charter Italic would
> > look more sophisticated and also get more information on a line.
> > 
> 
> Is it an open font.
Not sure, it s distributed with the X Window System and xorg.
We could use something from openfontlibrary too, that's a good point.

> 
> > Choosing a desktop - help said "broken link"
> > 
> 
> Shouldn't the help be included inside the installer's media.

Help is there for most other things.

> 
> > Choosing a desktop - please add versions, not just KDE, GNOME, Other.
> > 
> 
> I'm not sure versions are a good idea because they may be confusing. I'm also
> not sure many users who start with Linux will understand the difference between
> KDE, GNOME or whatever, so maybe we should pick one or the other by default.

Many people know whether they want gnome 2 or 3 right now, and for
people who don't know the difference it's no more confusing.

> 
> > Also, I might want both KDE and GNOME installed, so I don't want to
> > choose just one and not the other. If I'll get a chance to install more
> > desktops later in the installer, please say so more clearly, not buried
> > in help (once the link to help is fixed)...
> 
> Yes.

(there was no such option during install)


> > The installer seems much slower than it used to be, but maybe that's
> > changes in rpm? Three hours to install packages is a long time. Although
> > having said that, maybe the estimates were just wrong.
> 
> How strange. I was able to install Mageia 2 in a VM (from the Dual CD though)
> in a few minutes.


> > 
> > At the end, several hours later, the DVD is ejected and the system tries
> > to reboot...
> > 
> > PANIC cannot mount proc on /proc! Compile the kernel with
> > CONFIG_PROC_FS!
> > 
> > Hmm. Well, I saw something go by about this on the mailing list so maybe
> > I can fix it without another 7-hour download of the DVD image.
> > 
> > Overall, though, the installer needs a huge injection of "slickness".
> > It's_almost_ there, but in graphic design "almost" doesn't get you a
> > cigar.
> 
> That's true. By the way “GUI Design" is not graphic design.

No, but graphic design is part of GUI design too :-) There are aspects
that are subjectives and aspects that are to do with they way human
vision and perception operate, which is why there are strong elements in
common e.g. between Hindi, English, Spanish, Hebrew and Arabic.

The things that make "slickness" are more or less constant across
cultures: align things, treat similar things similarly, use contrast,
compositional balance, proximity (I love Robin Williams' summary of
these principles).

Thank you for replying!

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml