Re: [ANNOUNCE] DragonFly BSD Installer BETA

[Ivan Voras <ivoras@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

GeekGod wrote:
> Greetings!
>
> Thanks everyone for the kind words!!   We have posted a new version of the
> installer located at http://www.livebsd.com/dfly .
>
> If you could help us test this new version with _MANY_ improvements, we
> would appreciate it.

Ok, here's what I found:

- On the boot loader screen, choosing ACPI gives error about ACPI being 
unavailable (I don't think this is installer's fault, though...)
- During bootup, there are several messages about looking for pfi.conf 
on various partitions (nonexistant...) and mount_msdos not finding them
- The keyboard and font choosers are very nice. There are some 
suggestions, though:
    - I think you should make the font chooser first, so that the 
language names display prperly for such languages that don't use normal 
ASCII
    - Although the letters are highlighted, they don't work as 
"hotkeys"? Also: a bot silly having tens of options with the same hotkey ?
    - I think you should make English keyboard and font (iso-8859-1) 
the defaults (no disrespect to non-english users [I am one...], but for 
overwhelming number of instalations [all mine...] it will be the default)

Generally, it would probably be a good idea to include Help screens (for 
example, about 'what does "packet" option of the boot loader do').

I tried the install on a blank VMware disk, and when I tried to 'use 
only part of disk', I couldn't - the installer asked me to "Select 
primary partition" (what is this? there are only two options - type 165 
and 'Go Back'), and then an error was reported : 'executing disklabel -B 
-r -w ad0s4 - device not configured' or such. Since this is a blank 
disk, there is certainly no ad0s4. The option to see the outputs of 
commands after such error occures is REALLY nice, good idea! What would 
be even nicer is to ALSO have a 'report console' and the shell available 
during the whole time (like in FreeBSD).

Attempting (without reboot, which is nice) to install using 'Entire 
disk' went fine.

About the partition creating screen:
- You should really include a status message about how much space is 
used/available. (what about systems spanning multiple slices/devices?)
- The navigation in the screen is really cumbersome. Some kind of "grid" 
navigation really should be implemented (e.g. the up/down arrows move to 
prevous/next row)
- The partition editor allows me to enter invalid characters in the SIZE 
field. (what about invalid characters in the mountpoint field? are there 
any that apply?)
- Creating larger-than-available-space partition gets caught (albeit 
only after the 'commit' action), and the user must go back and fix it. 
BUT, when I entered a too small partition (1M) for /var, it complained 
but allowd me to proceed. I don't know if UFS has a minimum partition 
size (though I heard people formatting floppies with it...), but maybe a 
definitive minimum partition size could be enforced? Something like 16M?
- After the partitions were created with a 1M /var in the above case, I 
went back to correct it, but after I re-created the entry (it was 
deleted from the table?!) and tried to proceed, errors popped out about 
unable to mount it (device busy). Going back a few screens resulted in 
"unable to umount it (not mounted)" errors.

About the user-creation screen:
- The installer should deduce the user's default home directory to be 
/home/username
- Maybe it should show the future user's UID/GID?


Also, rebooting from the installer takes a long time (longer than a 
regular reboot from a running installation). But that could be something 
specific to my enfironment.

There, I'll go to sleep now :)