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

[Liam R E Quin]

Tried installing 3.0 beta over a Mandriva Cooker system today.
Mageia-3-beta1-x86_64-DVD.iso

Some notes. Mostly about problems because I never got to see a working
system, so the tone is probably more negative than I'd like.


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.

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 :-)) 

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.

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.

There's no indication of how long the formatting will take, or how much
has been done. I'll leave it running for an hour or two (it's a 250G
SATA hard drive) and see if it finishes, or maybe it crashed.
Please add a note that this may take a long time, preferably with an
OK/Cancel/Skip since (1) it wasn't needed here, and (2) users may well
give it a minute or so and then move on to the next Linux distribution
on the magazine, saying "Mageia hung my computer, it's crap."

Suggest progress bar or at least some quotes from Moliére.

Note: eventually the bad block scan started giving a progress percentage
on another virtual terminal, but most users won't find that, of course,
even if they wait half an hour or more for it to begin.

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.

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.

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.

Choosing a desktop - help said "broken link"

Choosing a desktop - please add versions, not just KDE, GNOME, Other.

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)...

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.

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.

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