[install-discuss] The Graphical Install Experience (Solaris, et.al.)

[Mike Pogue]

In my humble opinion, the graphical installation experience is tremendously important.

Why?  A developer starts to form opinions of Solaris/OpenSolaris almost immediately from the look and feel of the initial install (on their laptop, most likely).  Even if they use something like jumpstart later, that initial install experience sticks with them.  Yes, I've seen the mockup of what the install experience might look like in the future (I give it a 5 out of 10, maybe... :-).  

So, how can it be better?  Well, before we try to answer that, I figure we should all first be familiar with what other OS's are doing out there in the way of installation.  And, not everybody has the time to go do a bunch of installs themselves, just to form an opinion on graphical installation techniques.  

So, I've been busy doing some screen capturing for several OS's, so that everybody (yes, you) can participate in this discussion.  Here is my first try at presenting the results:

    http://www.zenstarstudio.com/install

I did installs of various OS's (Windows XP, S11b43, SuSE10, Ubuntu) under VMWare Workstation, and screen-captured the results.  I post-processed these down to individual frames, 1 second apart, and then I went through and picked up frames whenever anything interesting had changed.  I organized these sequentially, made thumbnails (automatically -- I'm not completely crazy), and I squished the whole thing into a couple of (somewhat ragged) web pages.  Oh, and of course, I had to add some snarky one-line comments about each page, too.

Note: The last 2 thumbnails on the Ubuntu page are what happens when you pop the Ubuntu CD into a Windows box.  Interesting idea, eh?

I invite you to check 'em out, compare and contrast the various installers, and join the discussion!

Note: I had trouble downloading RH from their website, so I don't yet have any screen captures for that OS.  Maybe they knew what I was going to do? :-)

Mike

P.S.  Feel free to contribute a better display page for these.  Locations of the full and thumb images are obvious from looking at the page source.  If I were a Flash programmer (which I'm not), I probably would have made a horizontal scrolling thingie to display the thumbnails -- that would have taken up much less vertical room than the CSS thing that I did.

P.P.S.  If the OpenSolaris install community wants to host this stuff, that would be a good idea, too.  I don't know when my site bandwidth will run out!
 
 
This message posted from opensolaris.org