Sounder *7* feedback (was: Sounder CD 8)

[Paul Sladen]

On Wed, 8 Sep 2004, Colin Watson wrote:
>   * Problems with CD-ROM drives seeking about a lot during install
>     should have been largely alleviated.

I've just been installing Sounder 7 under Qemu for the last few hours and
was going to comment that the packages could do with serialising/
pre-cacheing.

>   * The network configurator behaves better when DHCP is unavailable.

In Sounder 7, when DHCP fails and you scroll down to ``no network'', there
appears to be a blank menu item between the top 3-4 items and the next one.
I would expect the cursor to jump straight over instead of landing on the
blank.

In the long run (not warty), if it is /not/ installing from netinst I would
expect it to fail silently here.  ---It has enough packages not to need a
network connection yet.  The issue can then be re-presented to the user once
everything has finished and you've given them a nice desktop to play with.

>   * If "Copy packages to hard disk" is enabled, then you no longer need
>     the installation CD inserted after the first reboot.

This is an improvement, I was also going to comment on this.  It's a pity I
can't think of an easy way to have the bootable CD detect if it's half-way
through an installation and chain-load to the hard-disk instead.

This would need somewhere like NVRAM to save the flag (not really an
option);  or syslinux walk the partition tables and check for an appropriate
$flag (special partition type, flag in the blank first 32kB).
Or, given grub is reading the full ext2 FS, checking for a:

  `/ubuntu-half-bootstrapped'

file might be the most sensible option, if this were implemented.

-*- -*- -*- 

Oh yes, one last thing!

Whilst writing this email, the installation has just failed, with dpkg
complaining about "No space left on device" followed by, "There was a
problem installing the selected software".

It appears to have run out of diskspace---checking the available space at
the start would probably be an improvement.

	-Paul
-- 
Is there no safe way to travel?  Stirling, GB