I never did understand reviewers who slammed Vector because it had a text based installer. Hopefully, this will be able to keep them quite when it is polished.
Starting with "Find installation media"
I think a new user will be confused by "Select which distribution to install from the list below" really how many
distributions are we expecting to find on this CD.
Maybe it could be worded...Click "Search Again" to find installation media, if it is not found automatically.
after the list bar. Maybe something like..."Click next once media is discovered."
There is a lot of room for coaching points on this page. Coaching the newbie on minimum disk space
requirements is good, unfortunately, the numbers provided may not be accurate. I needed much more that 1800 mb for my root.
Disk Partitioning.
I found this a little confusing. First of all, it assumes a new user would be comfortable with GParted without anything in the way of help points at all.
Secondly, All the functions available from gparted are not even necessary.
After playing with this disk partitioning section till 4 in the morning trying to get GParted to format a partition to this or that, I found out the systems going to do it for me anyway after I click next.
GParted needs only to be used to create the 3 partitions needed for the install, all of them can and should be unformatted. All the formatting options, flags and labels is just confusing clutter. Once the user sets up his 3 unformatted partitions he needs to be coached to click "apply" and then "next." As it is now, I have to exit GParted by selecting Quit under the GParted drop down menu.
The next window then is almost perfect. It sees the 3 unformatted partitions and lets you choose both mount point and filesystem. (Including Ext3 which was not in Gparted.) The only suggestion I have here is how hard would it be to have the mount points automatically selected. The smallest being the swap, The largest being /home if three partitions of /root if only two. Little more math to it than that but you get the idea.
After choosing Next I selected Full install and away I went. Then the surprises...
I first partitioned for a 128mb swap, 2000mb root, and 16gig, home. The system errored out saying it ran out of space during the install.
Then I tried 128mb swap, 3000mb root and 15gig home. Again a system error, saying I ran out of space.
Finally, I tried 256 swap, 4000mb root and 14 gig home. This worked.
My last comment. Gnome with LXDE just does not make sense. If I have a computer powerful enough to get the most out of Gnome, why would I use LXDE. The opposite, is also true, If I need lxde for a comfortable speed on an older computer, there is no way I can get good performance on that machine with gnome.
I agree with wcs, XFCE seems like the right fit for standard. Gnome Deluxe makes sense you could even charge for it.
It would be ideal for me if at the end of this testing process you come out with two releases. A traditional standard but now with an option to use a graphical installer, plus better compatibility with some prime gnome apps. And also a Gnome Deluxe version to complement the KDE Deluxe version. Which I would be happy to pay my 30 bucks for.
