Proposal: Installing GNU

[Wolfgang Jaehrling]

The installation is the first aspect of a system that most users get
in contact with.  That is not the only reason why it is critical: If
the installation fails, the user will not be able to use the system at
all.

In former times, every journalist wrote that GNU/Linux is very hard to
install, no matter how easy it was.  So the distributors made it
easier and easier, until finally everyone was satisfied.  We do not
want that inexperienced users get deterred away from Free Software
because they hear that it is hard to install.  Therefore, it is
important to make it so easy that maybe even a journalist could get it
running. :->

Computers are complex machines.  Many people have tried in the past to
hide away the complexity.  They have succeeded in it, but usually
doing it caused a lot of unreliability.  The easiest installation is
not worth much when it does not work.


While many people have worked on making it easy to install an
operating system, nobody has ever tried to get rid of the concept of
operating system installation completely[*].  But this is exactly what
we should do.  Of course it is impossible to get rid of installations,
but it is the direction in which we should be heading.  We will still
need to setup some things, and we won't get around asking the user at
least one question.

 [*] Except for the "Live systems", of course.  But while they are
     very useful, they can hardly be called general-purpose operating
     systems.


Various things need to be set up, like the root password, network
connection etc.  This can be solved by either creating a system
configuration program and suggesting that the user may run it, or by
just providing documentation containing a list of things that need to
be done and explaining how to do them.


When I insert a CD to install a system and boot from it, I expect this
to be completely localized.  If proprietary systems can do this, why
shouldn't we be able to?  One may argue that one could present a menu
saying "Select your language", and I won't even argue against it; but
that text should preferably already be in the native language of the
user, and the default selection should also be exactly that.  (So that
when one gets a chinese CD, most users will be able to install the
system anyway).  But while we want to have pre-selected localization
information, we still don't want to distribute more than one CD image,
as storage on most mirror servers is not unlimited.

It is easiely possible with the following mechanism: The idea is to
have a tool that sets the localization of an existing CD image, so
that there is no need for distributing different CD images.  As long
as the localization information (which language to use, which keyboard
layout to assume etc.) is of fixed size, manipulating the CD image
directly seems not be too much of a problem.  Finding the correct
place in the image should be easy as well.


During the installation, I do not want to be bothered with questions
which are not relevant to me, neither should inexperienced users be
bothered with questions they don't understand.  Thus, I think it is a
good idea to have three options for installation:

- ``Use GNU as the only system on this computer.''

Let's assume a user has a computer with no operating system installed
on it, but she has a GNU CD and wants to install it.  She boots from
the CD and selects this option.  It creates a file system, copies some
software that the user is likely to want into it, sets up a boot
manager and starts a Neighbourhurd, so that the user directly gets
into the system.  She did not notice a typical installation procedure
with lots of options to select, at least one required reboot and so
on.

- ``Use GNU in addition to other systems.''

This would require the user to partition the hard drives and create
file systems on her own.  Otherwise, it would not be much different
from the first option.

- ``Do a custom setup (recommended only for experienced users).''

This would also allow to specify which packages she wants to use and
probably a few other things.  It actually seems like a good idea to
have a hierarchy of the different settings (with at most two layers
only, otherwise it gets confusing), so that she can quickly set the
options she's actually interested in changing, and use the defaults
for everything else.

Cheers,
Wolfgang

-- 
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