Arch Linux

Olli

Member

Registered: 2004-04-01

Posts: 57

Installer suggestions

Hey all,

I'm just new to AL, and I already like it!
Although I have a few suggestions for the installer, which is compared to, let's say Debian (sorry I've just used that quite a lot) a bit too 'simple'.

Things I've noticed that could be improved:

- Setting mountpoints:

I found this to be quite strange to be quite honest. Why? Well first of all it asks where your swap and your 'root' mountpoint should be, so far so good. But after that it gets kind of confusing. It would be nice if the mountpoints you've already set would appear as such in the list of 'disks' to mount.

Next to that I've noticed when I make a more complex partition scheme (with logical disks) it gets absolutely strange. Example:

hda1    /            primary
hda2    /home            primary
hda3    swap             primary
hda3    /usr                  logical
hda6    /home/smb     logical
hda7    /home/www    logical
hda8    /tmp             logical
hda9    /var              logical 

Alright these are the 8 partitions I've created, so I would expect to have 8 options to configure the mountpoints, but to my surprise it had 9. So which is which?? In the end (because I couldn't figure it out), I settled with an easier partition scheme

- The last bit where you can actually tinker around with your configuration files could easily be done with a few dialogs. It's not that I don't know how to play around with them, but it's just nice to have a dialog that presents you the available options, plus it is timesaving

Like I said these are only suggestions, the install was not difficult, but it could be even easier

Thanks for a great distro!

Olli

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DIY: Doom-It-Yourself

colnago

Member

From: Victoria, BC

Registered: 2004-03-25

Posts: 438

Re: Installer suggestions

I think the 9th mount option was for the root of your logical partitions.  The mount locations displayed should make this clear.  This and the way the installer handles existing partitions when you do not want to format them require a leap of faith.  I would rather this be the case, and the partitioning work, than some other installs I have seen where the partitions get buggered or formetted when you don't want them to be.  The nice thing is that this is easy to play around with and get use to before you start selecting packages or anything.  I did find that you have to rebootr if you want to drastically change a partitioning scheme, as the old one had a tendency to linger (esp if trying to manual after selecting auto).