new look installer... why?

[Sean Miller]

Travis Newman wrote:

>Agreed. The problem is that a lot of people will see that they can't
>use the mouse and get scared, when in reality, it's much easier than
>most graphical installers I've used. Most people are used to the
>paperclip telling them how to use Word, so having to do ANYTHING that
>even looks complicated will make them run away. I don't think Ubuntu
>needs a graphical installer, because I don't care how many people use
>  
>
My two changes to the Ubuntu distribution would be...
a) I'd add some automatic partitioning to the installer, similar to SuSE 
and Fedora... if somebody already has Windows on there these two are 
great at guiding them through getting a dual-boot setup. They will find 
free space, suggest it's used etc. etc.... with Ubuntu I had to manually 
change my grub config even to get it to put Windows on the start menu.
b) I'd fix the "noscsi" issue that always seems to happen on my laptop 
with live CDs based on Debian (eg. Knoppix, Ubuntu etc.) -- in that if 
you don't manually add "noscsi" to the boot command then it gets halfway 
through and just "collapses"... I have given the live CD to several 
others and many of them have reported a crash halfway through. If this 
is the first impression then it doesn't help anybody. Surely there must 
be some way that these live CDs can prevent themselves from 
crashing/hanging? Maybe better error handling or something (?) -- wasn't 
an issue with the install, incidently, just with the Live CD.

>Ubuntu really. I love it, I know it's great software, and I think that
>the bottom line should be keeping the quality, not attracting users.
>It all comes down to how you define "success." People say that Firefox
>will never succeed until they get their product bundled with new
>computers, but they're thinking commercial success. The developers of
>Firefox set out to make a good, standards-compliant browser, and
>they've succeeded. THAT's the kind of success we should focus on, I
>think.
>  
>
Talking of Mozilla, Thunderbird 1.0.... I installed it the other day, 
but the "Delete" functionality doesn't work... either from the icon, or 
from the various drop downs (eg. mouse/menu at top etc.).... just 
doesn't do anything at all... anybody else had this problem? Any way to 
get around it?

Sean