Star Debunking Some Myths About Graphical Installers
Linked by Paul Hankes Drielsma on Tue 15th Apr 2003 06:40 UTC
Graphics, User Interfaces I can't take anymore comments like "Debian/Gentoo/OpenBSD/etc. are not good/user-friendly because they lack a graphical installer." Searching the web, I couldn't find a comprehensive site describing the good and the bad about graphical installers for various OSes throughout the years, so in this article I hope to debunk a few of the myths on the basis of my own personal and professional experience.
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Hi all,
I am totally blind, so the question of which type of installer is almost always (until much later, I feel, when GTK is fully supported) undisputably going to be text. Text is conceptually simple to represent as speech or braille, so making a character-based semi-GUI using ncurses or whatever is alright but linear prompts are even nicer, especially since the dawn of Windows whose screen readers understand the GUI and no longer - as older DOS ones did - ASCII art to represent basic GUI features. Since I have had assistance with stepping through a number of graphical installers for Windows and Linux alike, I have traditionally felt that - as a savvy and complex-minded individual - text-based installers are the way to go. Consoles can be accessed on a Windows machine for which the GUI is fully available to run a terminal to drive a Linux box, not during just installation but in typical operation. Script automation is also desirable - wherever present, it is a great feature to be able to install an OS such as 2K (possible with XP but I dislike it) using simply an unattended setup script, and I owe Microsoft for not only offering this feature but realising that such a niche audience require it. To answer Aesiamun - dig on your CD for a file named deploy.cab which you should open and read unattend.doc. HTH :-) I use this method, I don't even need to connect the monitor!

I love the concept of open source. Yes, whichever is your preference, for whichever audience, determines your choice. I only ask or hope that wherever such a variety of choices is made available, the same functionality - to the very letter - is made available in all installers. Debian's new debconf present in features in the Sarge installer (along with brltty to display the console install debootstrapped) sound excellent, giving the user the choice in the best fashion possible. A pretty observant and generally good article, I thought.

I am trying to install Slack 9 (whose text installer I find to be among the nicest) using parameters "console=ttyS0" but for my recently purchased CD set or floppies made from it it doesn't appear to work... Hmm... Any ideas?

Cheers.