Some suggestions about setup

[J.B. Nicholson-Owens]

Ben Novack wrote:
> Since Hoary Hedgehog's going GUI for the install [...]

Speaking of a GUI installer, I've got some suggestions to offer:

1. Consider not asking me what name to call my computer.

I view computer naming as a DNS issue -- something set by my DNS administrator, 
not me.  The pre-Warty disc appears to get its hostname from DHCP anyhow. 
Perhaps the user could be asked about a hostname if there's no DHCP server?

2. Please let me indicate that I want a partition to be mounted automatically 
but not formatted.

Although I can appreciate some of the achievement the new Debian installer 
represents, I think that Anaconda presents an easier installer to use in part 
because the partitioning is easier to understand and faster to work with in 
Anaconda.  But there is one thing I like about the pre-Warty disc partitioning 
tool: I can use an extant partition and tell the installer not to format the 
partition but to use the partition as part of my new system.

I plan to use this to keep my /home partition by simply not formatting it, and 
formatting all the other partitions (/boot, /, /tmp, and swap) then making user 
accounts which will allow people to login to their account and see all of their 
old files.

3. Installing/uninstalling support for additional languages would be great.

I like how Fedora Core lets me add support for additional languages, but it's 
an option I can only leverage at the time I install the OS.  I don't know what 
set of packages stands behind turning on "French" support, for instance.  So I 
can't decide later (even if I'm handy with the rpm command) to add or remove 
French support.

4. It might not make sense to ask what timezone the computer is in.

For desktop computers, the machine will probably exist in one timezone long 
enough to want to settle this at OS install time.  But laptops travel, so such 
a question might not make sense at OS install time.

Furthermore, it might make more sense to assign a timezone to a user account 
instead of a machine.  It might also make sense to see if there's a GPS unit 
mounted and get your timezone data for a machine or a particular account from 
the GPS unit.

5. Automatically doing the right thing is nice, particularly for networking.

It's nice to be able to simply attach an ethernet cable to a machine and have 
the computer handle all the technical parts of setting up the network.  The 
same is true for wireless.  If doing this during the install is hard to 
achieve, the installer should tell me when I should attach to the network.

Thanks again.