Flight 5 installation and first impressions report

[Dmitriy Kropivnitskiy]

I just installed Flight 5 from scratch (except for my home directory
which I kept intact). Here are a few notes I took on the way:

Installer:

1. The new menu is great. Especially the fact that I can choose my boot
screen resolution and grub remembers it after install. Wish there was a
way to change it after the fact without going manually into the grub.conf.

2. I have a Windows partition on my system and installer found and
recognized it as NTFS. It even added it to the grub boot menu. But when
it offered me choices for partitioning it was either erase all or
manual. Other distros would generally have erase all, erase all linux
partitions or manual, which still would not help me (kept the /home) but
would be very nice for someone with a more straightforward install.
Also, installer offered to mount my Windows partition as /windows, so I
happily agreed, but it failed without specifying any reasons.

3. During the package installation process two things caught my eye.
When copying package files from the CD, the installer claims to be
"downloading" them which I found very misleading (actually went to a
console to figure out what is going on) and also, when
preparing/unpacking/etc packages the package names and stages scroll too
fast to read, so there is no way for the user to read what is going on.
If this information is not important to the user, I don't think it
should be there (progress bar should be enough to indicate activity) and
if it is considered important (in case of a failed install or something)
there should be some pointer where the user can reach it after wards
(installer log files I suppose).

After install:


1. I still think the interface for adding multiverse/universe
repositories using GUI is very unintuitive and that is something most
users would want to do

2. Insert an encrypted DVD. Get "Totem is unable to play this disk. No
reason" message. I understand the restricted format issues and if I use
command line to run totem I actually get a more meaningful error saying
that libdvdcss is not installed, but totem's habit of saying "No reason"
is very unnerving.

3. Installed mp3 support and started playing a file. Goom is the default
visual, but all I get is a blank totem screen. Plays fine though.

4. I have a MIDI-to-USB device plugged-in and it was recognized as a
sound card, so no sound. Had to actually go and dig around through
forums and manually edit asound.conf to choose which device to use by
default to play sounds.

5. In both hwinfo and read-edid my monitor reports that its default
resolution is 1280x1024, but highest possible (1920 x 1440 at 60Hz) is
chosen. I know this was already reported, but there was a discussion
about weather a monitor is able to tell what the default resolution
should be. My VIEWSONIC G90fb seems to be able to, and still wrong one
is chosen by default.