How much of Fedora 18-Alpha-TC3 netinst.iso should I expect to work? It booted from DVD on bare metal and brought up graphics, but after that I encountered many problems.
Media_check did not run, despite being included in the default selection on the boot screen ("verify source...").
<Tab> did not move the focus to the next graphical button on the Choose Language screen.
There was no progress indicator for Installation Source, Software Selection (downloading repo info, checking dependencies), or Installation Destination (examining storage devices).
The left box (Desktop) of Installation type (Base, GNOME, KDE, LXDE, Sugar, XFCE) was unclear. Is it a radio-button list (select only one) but without the buttons? The box abuts the left margin, and looks like something has been cut off on the left. The right box (Addons) was hard to track. There should be a separate list of current selections. There should be an option to hide/display the descriptions (with the names always displayed.) It should be possible to search by regex. Display of dependencies should be available.
Installation Destination gave only the barest info: disk manufacturer and model, with gross capacity. There was no connection information (sda, sdb, ...; pci-...-scsi-...; usbN; etc.). Horizontal scrolling sucks; my box has 5 drives, and I want to see them all at once. Sometimes I have multiple drives of the same make and model, so I need to see the serial numbers, too. I want to see the volume label type (MSDOS, GPT, Apple, ...), plus the partitions, size, label, filesystem type, used space, unused space, last mount point: everything that gparted displays. There was no message "No LVM2 structures were found" which is required in order to increase my confidence and help detect errors.
Then the installer crashed, and the bug report via network to bugzilla was incomplete because "you do not have permission to access the file". [Bug 848994] New: IndexError: list index out of range
On Thu, 2012-08-16 at 21:26 -0700, John Reiser wrote:
Then the installer crashed, and the bug report via network to bugzilla was incomplete because "you do not have permission to access the file".
This is a known issue (bug in libreport) and should be fixed in a new libreport build for F18. In the meantime please use this workaround -- uncheck all empty items in the provided information overview.
John Reiser (jreiser@bitwagon.com) said:
The left box (Desktop) of Installation type (Base, GNOME, KDE, LXDE, Sugar, XFCE) was unclear. Is it a radio-button list (select only one) but without the buttons? The box abuts the left margin, and looks like something has been cut off on the left. The right box (Addons) was hard to track. There should be a separate list of current selections. There should be an option to hide/display the descriptions (with the names always displayed.) It should be possible to search by regex. Display of dependencies should be available.
This is being reworked currently.
Bill
How much of Fedora 18-Alpha-TC3 netinst.iso should I expect to work? It booted from DVD on bare metal and brought up graphics, but after that I encountered many problems.
The minimum is https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_18_Alpha_Release_Criteria.
Media_check did not run, despite being included in the default selection on the boot screen ("verify source...").
I don't know that this has actually been tested yet. I've tested the graphical media check button on the installation source spoke, and that has worked in the past.
<Tab> did not move the focus to the next graphical button on the Choose Language screen.
Tab works as I expect it both on the initial welcome language screen, as well as the language spoke off the first hub. All UI elements are focusable.
There was no progress indicator for Installation Source, Software Selection (downloading repo info, checking dependencies), or Installation Destination (examining storage devices).
Right, progress indicators are really hard to do and are a never-ending source of bugs. They're especially hard to do for things that involve the network. Additionally, feedback we've gotten in the past says we have way too many popups.
So the idea here is that you can go do other stuff while long-running tasks work themselves out which makes progress indicators a little less helpful.
The left box (Desktop) of Installation type (Base, GNOME, KDE, LXDE, Sugar, XFCE) was unclear. Is it a radio-button list (select only one) but without the buttons? The box abuts the left margin, and looks like something has been cut off on the left.
It's a radio button list. This is perhaps a little unclear. I'll talk to mizmo about adding radio buttons.
By "the box abuts the left margin", you just mean that it looks odd without any sort of button/box next to it, right? If you mean something else, can you attach a screenshot?
The right box (Addons) was hard to track. There should be a separate list of current selections.
This screen is unfinished. When it's finished, I think it will be a little easier to keep track of.
There should be an option to hide/display the descriptions (with the names always displayed.) It should be possible to search by regex. Display of dependencies should be available.
Why? No one has ever asked for these sorts of things before, and they'd have to have pretty good justifications.
Installation Destination gave only the barest info: disk manufacturer and model, with gross capacity. There was no connection information (sda, sdb, ...; pci-...-scsi-...; usbN; etc.).
We've not gotten much feedback asking for this. USB devices should be able to be shown with a different icon, but we've not done that yet.
Horizontal scrolling sucks; my box has 5 drives, and I want to see them all at once.
There is a limit to how much can be displayed at once. I'm sure there are people out there with 20 drives who want to see them all at once. You can use the disk shopping cart (button on the bottom left) to see what all you've got selected at once, though.
Horizontal scrolling - does the box not scroll with the keyboard? We've had this problem elsewhere and if that's happening, I should be able to fix it.
Sometimes I have multiple drives of the same make and model, so I need to see the serial numbers, too.
The serial number is available if you hover the mouse.
I want to see the volume label type (MSDOS, GPT, Apple, ...), plus the partitions, size, label, filesystem type, used space, unused space, last mount point: everything that gparted displays.
We might be able to work used and unused space in somehow (original mockups had little pie chart things for this), but some of the rest is not ever going to make it into a UI.
There was no message "No LVM2 structures were found" which is required in order to increase my confidence and help detect errors.
What?
- Chris
<Tab> did not move the focus to the next graphical button on the Choose Language screen.
Tab works as I expect it both on the initial welcome language screen, as well as the language spoke off the first hub. All UI elements are focusable.
<Tab> did not move focus for me; or perhaps it did, but the newly-focused button was not highlighted. I'll file a bug.
There was no progress indicator for Installation Source, Software Selection (downloading repo info, checking dependencies), or Installation Destination (examining storage devices).
Right, progress indicators are really hard to do and are a never-ending source of bugs. They're especially hard to do for things that involve the network. Additionally, feedback we've gotten in the past says we have way too many popups.
So the idea here is that you can go do other stuff while long-running tasks work themselves out which makes progress indicators a little less helpful.
There is a 5-second deadline. Anything longer requires a progress bar (or at least some changing indicator "I'm still alive"), else it's equivalent to a "hang". It is much more pleasant to have a progress bar. I'll wait patiently much longer if I have some reasonable indication of how close it is to being done, and if I can estimate the completion time.
The left box (Desktop) of Installation type (Base, GNOME, KDE, LXDE, Sugar, XFCE) was unclear. Is it a radio-button list (select only one) but without the buttons? The box abuts the left margin, and looks like something has been cut off on the left.
It's a radio button list. This is perhaps a little unclear. I'll talk to mizmo about adding radio buttons.
By "the box abuts the left margin", you just mean that it looks odd without any sort of button/box next to it, right? If you mean something else, can you attach a screenshot?
There needs to be a margin, else it looks like something was cut off. Also, it's really hard to read when the first character of a line has less than 0.5 'n' of space to the left.
[snip]
Horizontal scrolling sucks; my box has 5 drives, and I want to see them all at once.
There is a limit to how much can be displayed at once. I'm sure there are people out there with 20 drives who want to see them all at once. You can use the disk shopping cart (button on the bottom left) to see what all you've got selected at once, though.
Horizontal scrolling - does the box not scroll with the keyboard? We've had this problem elsewhere and if that's happening, I should be able to fix it.
The box scrolls with the mouse, but there are only 2 drives visible at any time. An ordinary table of text, with columns of attributes and rows of drives (including a small icon for the type of drive) would be better. Such a table could list 12 drives easily before vertical scrolling would become necessary. Horizontal scrolling would allow more attributes at once, there could be 6 or 7 columns of attributes (icon, make, model, size, serial, MSDOS/GPT/Apple) before scrolling.
Sometimes I have multiple drives of the same make and model, so I need to see the serial numbers, too.
The serial number is available if you hover the mouse.
If I can't see it, and am not told it's there, then it isn't there. Requiring hover is also bad for those who use assisting technologies.
There was no message "No LVM2 structures were found" which is required in order to increase my confidence and help detect errors.
What?
If disk discovery gets something wrong. then there is a moderate chance of data loss, and that would be catastrophic. The GUI tells me if LVM2 was discovered. It also should tell me if LVM2 was _not_ discovered.
Tab works as I expect it both on the initial welcome language screen, as well as the language spoke off the first hub. All UI elements are focusable.
<Tab> did not move focus for me; or perhaps it did, but the newly-focused button was not highlighted. I'll file a bug.
I can't reproduce it, though, so I don't know what I can possibly do. I tried with both a locally built image and with the TC3 one up for download.
There is a 5-second deadline. Anything longer requires a progress bar (or at least some changing indicator "I'm still alive"), else it's equivalent to a "hang". It is much more pleasant to have a progress bar. I'll wait patiently much longer if I have some reasonable indication of how close it is to being done, and if I can estimate the completion time.
What I'm saying, though, is that we can't provide a reasonable indication of things. We've played the pervasive progress bar game in the past, and it just didn't work. A lot of our progress bars weren't even progress, they just bounced back and forth. This is because for a lot of things we can't make good guesses about how long it's going to take (network troubles), and a lot of things make it extremely difficult (screen scraping mkfs output).
There needs to be a margin, else it looks like something was cut off. Also, it's really hard to read when the first character of a line has less than 0.5 'n' of space to the left.
Can you take a screenshot? I'm definitely seeing a good amount of margin on both the left and right sides that make it easy to read. I wonder if this is an artifact of screensize.
The box scrolls with the mouse, but there are only 2 drives visible at any time. An ordinary table of text, with columns of attributes and rows of drives (including a small icon for the type of drive) would be better. Such a table could list 12 drives easily before vertical scrolling would become necessary. Horizontal scrolling would allow more attributes at once, there could be 6 or 7 columns of attributes (icon, make, model, size, serial, MSDOS/GPT/Apple) before scrolling.
This makes for a wall of text UI which isn't really very pleasing at all. We can make minor changes, of course, but this big grid of overwhelming data is really something we're trying to get away from. I'd love to get mizmo's take on this.
If I can't see it, and am not told it's there, then it isn't there. Requiring hover is also bad for those who use assisting technologies.
We can work on making information more discoverable, but the answer is not to generate a giant table of data.
There was no message "No LVM2 structures were found" which is required in order to increase my confidence and help detect errors.
What?
If disk discovery gets something wrong. then there is a moderate chance of data loss, and that would be catastrophic. The GUI tells me if LVM2 was discovered. It also should tell me if LVM2 was _not_ discovered.
Should we also tell you that RAID was not discovered? Multipath was not discovered? What else do you want to know wasn't there? We can't read your mind as to what you think should be on a disk and then tell you that we didn't find it correctly.
You are doing an installation, please make backups. That's the first advice you get everywhere.
- Chris
On Aug 17, 2012, at 9:41 AM, Chris Lumens wrote:
If I can't see it, and am not told it's there, then it isn't there. Requiring hover is also bad for those who use assisting technologies.
We can work on making information more discoverable, but the answer is not to generate a giant table of data.
I agree the answer is to not generate a wall of data.
In the order users identify disks by - user defined metadata (i.e. partition/volume labels) - price - size - make/model - device tree location or enclosure brand if USB/FW - serial number
Obviously you can't show price. But I don't understand why existing partition/volume labels aren't displayed. User metadata is highly recognizable to users. Connections and serial numbers are much more obscure.
Arguably if every drive were size, make, model identical, then size, make, model shouldn't even be displayed, only uniquely identifying information should be displayed, in order to both uniquely identify disks (the point of the UI) and avoid the UI clutter wall of data syndrome.
Chris Murphy
On Fri, 2012-08-17 at 08:17 -0700, John Reiser wrote:
There is a 5-second deadline. Anything longer requires a progress bar (or at least some changing indicator "I'm still alive"), else it's equivalent to a "hang".
The number from Jakob Nielsen's studies is actually 10 seconds, FWIW: http://www.webperformancetoday.com/tag/jakob-nielsen/
By "the box abuts the left margin", you just mean that it looks odd without any sort of button/box next to it, right? If you mean something else, can you attach a screenshot?
There needs to be a margin, else it looks like something was cut off. Also, it's really hard to read when the first character of a line has less than 0.5 'n' of space to the left.
This is really hard to figure out without a screenshot, can you send one? It shouldn't look as you're describing so there may be a bug affecting the margins.
The box scrolls with the mouse, but there are only 2 drives visible at any time. An ordinary table of text, with columns of attributes and rows of drives (including a small icon for the type of drive) would be better. Such a table could list 12 drives easily before vertical scrolling would become necessary. Horizontal scrolling would allow more attributes at once, there could be 6 or 7 columns of attributes (icon, make, model, size, serial, MSDOS/GPT/Apple) before scrolling.
The box should show 4-5 drives before requiring scrolling, so I think this issue would also be more easily sorted with a screenshot of this screen, can you provide one?
If I can't see it, and am not told it's there, then it isn't there.
Do we have anything set for right-click on the drives right now? Maybe we could have it pop up on right-click since right-click is commonly used for 'more details' about an object?
Requiring hover is also bad for those who use assisting technologies.
Mouseover hovers are fine so long as keyboard focus triggers the same hover, since some assisting technologies involve the use of keyboard, joystick, or switches. Users who use assisting technologies where eye-tracking moves the mouse (head or eye-tracking equipment) use blinks to click the mouse so they could still hover as well.
There was no message "No LVM2 structures were found" which is required in order to increase my confidence and help detect errors.
What?
If disk discovery gets something wrong. then there is a moderate chance of data loss, and that would be catastrophic. The GUI tells me if LVM2 was discovered. It also should tell me if LVM2 was _not_ discovered.
You should always back up your data before running an installer, especially one that's under heavy development. :)
~m
1. Installation Summary: has a Continue button Date & Time: depends on Back button to continue Language: depends on Back button to continue Keyboard: depends on Back button to continue Installation Source: depends on Back button to continue Network Configuration: depends on Back button to continue Software Selection: depends on Back button to continue Installation Destination: has a Continue button
Seeing as the UI lets me do these things in any order, it seems arbitrary that Storage alone gets a "Continue" button.
2. If all Installation Summary items are complete, lacking an orange triangle warning, I can "Continue" from the installation summary page. However, if I merely enter Installation Source, make no changes, and click "Back," now "Software Selection" inexplicably has an orange triangle next to it, and I can no longer "Continue" from the installation summary page, as the Continue button is grayed out.
3. Despite the condition where I cannot Continue from the Installation Summary, if I go into Installation Destination, the Continue button there is not grayed out. If I click it, and click Continue on the dialog which appears, I'm returned to Installation Summary.
Chris Murphy
Installation Summary: has a Continue button Date & Time: depends on Back button to continue Language: depends on Back button to continue Keyboard: depends on Back button to continue Installation Source: depends on Back button to continue Network Configuration: depends on Back button to continue Software Selection: depends on Back button to continue Installation Destination: has a Continue button
Seeing as the UI lets me do these things in any order, it seems arbitrary that Storage alone gets a "Continue" button.
Unfortunately, Storage is special.
What you need to know is that the Continue button on the storage spoke does not move you ahead from the hub. It potentially takes you back to the hub, but perhaps first sends you through other screens (the disk tug of war screen that's not written yet, or custom partitioning, or other such things). In that case, hitting Back and then going through other things instead of back to where you were doesn't make a lot of sense.
So yeah, the storage back button isn't the same as the hub back button. I don't really have a good answer for how to make this nicer, though we've certainly thought a lot about it.
- If all Installation Summary items are complete, lacking an orange
triangle warning, I can "Continue" from the installation summary page. However, if I merely enter Installation Source, make no changes, and click "Back," now "Software Selection" inexplicably has an orange triangle next to it, and I can no longer "Continue" from the installation summary page, as the Continue button is grayed out.
I think the problem here is that we didn't detect that you left the Installation Source spoke unchanged. What we're trying to do here is fetch metadata for your source, which necessarily invalidates the Software Selection spoke (what if the group data is completely different?) so you can't go in there. That means you can't yet continue.
So if you don't do anything, we shouldn't try to do anything either. That'd fix this up.
- Despite the condition where I cannot Continue from the
Installation Summary, if I go into Installation Destination, the Continue button there is not grayed out. If I click it, and click Continue on the dialog which appears, I'm returned to Installation Summary.
Right, I think this is confusion that the two continue buttons are the same when in fact they are not. Again, I don't have any good ideas on how to make that situation better.
- Chris
On Aug 17, 2012, at 1:34 PM, Chris Lumens wrote:
Installation Summary: has a Continue button Date & Time: depends on Back button to continue Language: depends on Back button to continue Keyboard: depends on Back button to continue Installation Source: depends on Back button to continue Network Configuration: depends on Back button to continue Software Selection: depends on Back button to continue Installation Destination: has a Continue button
Seeing as the UI lets me do these things in any order, it seems arbitrary that Storage alone gets a "Continue" button.
Unfortunately, Storage is special. What you need to know is that the Continue button on the storage spoke does not move you ahead from the hub. It potentially takes you back to the hub, but perhaps first sends you through other screens
Fair enough.
The Back button for all sub-sections needs better location, it took me a while to discover it, as well as the fact it was the only way out of the sub-section I was in. This is a nitpick.
Alternatively, in context of being in these sub-sections, Continue in lieu of Back is not inconsistent with returning to the Installation Summary. This is exactly how the Storage sub-section Continue button works if the user hasn't completed all items in Installation Summary.
Also a nitpick, the Software Selection UI has two halves with different UI. The Desktop selection UI lacks checkboxes for items, the Add-Ons selection has checkboxes for items. The difference in UI resulted in temporary confusion how I was supposed to interact.
- Despite the condition where I cannot Continue from the
Installation Summary, if I go into Installation Destination, the Continue button there is not grayed out. If I click it, and click Continue on the dialog which appears, I'm returned to Installation Summary.
Right, I think this is confusion that the two continue buttons are the same when in fact they are not. Again, I don't have any good ideas on how to make that situation better.
Understood.
Chris Murphy
On Fri, 2012-08-17 at 12:45 -0600, Chris Murphy wrote:
Installation Summary: has a Continue button Date & Time: depends on Back button to continue Language: depends on Back button to continue Keyboard: depends on Back button to continue Installation Source: depends on Back button to continue Network Configuration: depends on Back button to continue Software Selection: depends on Back button to continue Installation Destination: has a Continue button
Seeing as the UI lets me do these things in any order, it seems arbitrary that Storage alone gets a "Continue" button.
Storage is more than one step. The other dialogs aren't. Storage is by far the most complex section. So it's not arbitrary.
- If all Installation Summary items are complete, lacking an orange
triangle warning, I can "Continue" from the installation summary page. However, if I merely enter Installation Source, make no changes, and click "Back," now "Software Selection" inexplicably has an orange triangle next to it, and I can no longer "Continue" from the installation summary page, as the Continue button is grayed out.
That sounds like a bug if you didn't make any changes.
- Despite the condition where I cannot Continue from the Installation
Summary, if I go into Installation Destination, the Continue button there is not grayed out. If I click it, and click Continue on the dialog which appears, I'm returned to Installation Summary.
Are you confused because the storage section has a continue that isn't the same as the installation summary's continue?
The installation summary's continue was labeled 'continue with install' http://linuxgrrl.com/fedora-ux/Projects/Anaconda/Prototypes/Previews/hub-moc...
Is that not the case now?
~m
On Aug 17, 2012, at 2:25 PM, Máirín Duffy wrote:
On Fri, 2012-08-17 at 12:45 -0600, Chris Murphy wrote:
Installation Summary: has a Continue button Date & Time: depends on Back button to continue Language: depends on Back button to continue Keyboard: depends on Back button to continue Installation Source: depends on Back button to continue Network Configuration: depends on Back button to continue Software Selection: depends on Back button to continue Installation Destination: has a Continue button
Seeing as the UI lets me do these things in any order, it seems arbitrary that Storage alone gets a "Continue" button.
Storage is more than one step. The other dialogs aren't. Storage is by far the most complex section. So it's not arbitrary.
Fine.
- If all Installation Summary items are complete, lacking an orange
triangle warning, I can "Continue" from the installation summary page. However, if I merely enter Installation Source, make no changes, and click "Back," now "Software Selection" inexplicably has an orange triangle next to it, and I can no longer "Continue" from the installation summary page, as the Continue button is grayed out.
That sounds like a bug if you didn't make any changes.
Bug. No changes made.
- Despite the condition where I cannot Continue from the Installation
Summary, if I go into Installation Destination, the Continue button there is not grayed out. If I click it, and click Continue on the dialog which appears, I'm returned to Installation Summary.
Are you confused because the storage section has a continue that isn't the same as the installation summary's continue?
The installation summary's continue was labeled 'continue with install' http://linuxgrrl.com/fedora-ux/Projects/Anaconda/Prototypes/Previews/hub-moc...
Is that not the case now?
No. It merely is labeled "Continue"
Chris Murphy
The installation summary's continue was labeled 'continue with install' http://linuxgrrl.com/fedora-ux/Projects/Anaconda/Prototypes/Previews/hub-moc...
Is that not the case now?
No. It merely is labeled "Continue"
That should be easy enough to fix.
- Chris
On 08/17/2012 09:38 AM, Máirín Duffy wrote:
This is really hard to figure out without a screenshot, can you send one? It shouldn't look as you're describing so there may be a bug affecting the margins.
At first, no I could not take a screenshot. I was using an Apple keyboard which does not have a PrtScr key. (And no, I'm not going to type <AltGr> and three digits, particularly if the anaconda documentation doesn't say what those three digits are.) But then I found a PC keyboard. I submitted screenshots for bugs 849211, 848215, 848218. It would be nice if "esoteric" keys were not required to take a screenshot. Have an _additional_ key combination that is more likely to be available on all keyboards.
[snip]
You should always back up your data before running an installer, especially one that's under heavy development. :)
I've already done that. It took several hours at 50MB/s. I'd prefer to avoid doing the corresponding restore.
The point is that the installer looked for LVM2, raid, multi-path, etc., and did not find any. Please tell me so explicitly, so that *I* can avoid perception mistakes (not seeing what I'm not expecting even though it's there, ...)
On Fri, 2012-08-17 at 12:18 -0700, John Reiser wrote:
The point is that the installer looked for LVM2, raid, multi-path, etc., and did not find any. Please tell me so explicitly, so that *I* can avoid perception mistakes (not seeing what I'm not expecting even though it's there, ...)
With all due respect, we're not going to do that. If you want to see what anaconda found before you proceed, check the box that says you want to review and modify the partitions on your own. Anaconda will not change your storage configuration until you hit "Continue" on the main install hub.
On 08/17/2012 12:18 PM, John Reiser wrote:
The point is that the installer looked for LVM2, raid, multi-path, etc., and did not find any. Please tell me so explicitly, so that *I* can avoid perception mistakes (not seeing what I'm not expecting even though it's there, ...)
If you're really concerned, you can read through the log files. Otherwise it's too much information to display on screen.
On Aug 17, 2012, at 1:18 PM, John Reiser wrote:
On 08/17/2012 09:38 AM, Máirín Duffy wrote:
You should always back up your data before running an installer, especially one that's under heavy development. :)
The point is that the installer looked for LVM2, raid, multi-path, etc., and did not find any. Please tell me so explicitly, so that *I* can avoid perception mistakes (not seeing what I'm not expecting even though it's there, …)
I disagree. The issue is only arising due to lack of trust because this is a new UI, and all of its guts are likewise new and totally suspect. I think as alpha testers we need to know precisely what hardware we have, and its on-disk condition. If LVM or RAID are known to be present but the installer doesn't inform us, *that* is a legitimate complaint.
What we should get to is trust that if it doesn't find these things, they are not to be found. It could be an open question how quickly this trust is gained. But to build UI that confirms negative discovery is almost certainly unnecessary work.
Also legitimate is if the installer UI causes ambiguity in destination identification/selection. Not good for the reasons you mention. Another reason why I'd like to see partition/volume names (or labels, whatever they're called) if present. This is immediately and clearly discoverable information most of the time for users, especially in the very common case of dual-boot installations along side Windows (or Mac OS).
Chris Murphy
Hi John,
On Thu, 2012-08-16 at 21:26 -0700, John Reiser wrote:
Installation Destination gave only the barest info: disk manufacturer and model, with gross capacity. There was no connection information (sda, sdb, ...; pci-...-scsi-...; usbN; etc.).
We don't show sda/sdb/usbN/scsi (at least if you have more than one scsi card) because those are not reliable and can change from boot-to-boot because they're assigned based on scan ordering and the order in which the relevant modules are loaded. We're very cautious about protecting users from dataloss where we can, so if a storage label is not persistent / reliable, we decided to not use it.
We do plan to show different icons for disks based on their type as Chris described further down in the thread, but I think those are for USB vs local disk vs network disk. So if knowing a disk is pci vs scsi is helpful in identifying a given disk, we could consider putting in the hover information alongside the serial number.
Horizontal scrolling sucks; my box has 5 drives, and I want to see them all at once.
Can you tell us a little bit more about your setup? I'm guessing it's a desktop machine, right? What kind of drives do you have in it, how do you use them? Are they all the same size and RAIDed, or does each have a different OS, or...?
We're trying to design the UI to be as seamless as possibly for the majority of users who would use a GUI to install Fedora, which we've found is overwhelmingly laptop users who are necessarily limited to a small max bound of disks. However, we still want it to work for other cases.
Sometimes I have multiple drives of the same make and model, so I need to see the serial numbers, too.
We do display those if you hover over the drives. How do you know the serial number - do you open up the box and look so you are sure?
I want to see the volume label type (MSDOS, GPT, Apple, ...), plus the partitions, size, label, filesystem type, used space, unused space, last mount point: everything that gparted displays.
If you want to see all of the information that gparted displays, I would suggest using gparted. The installer environment is necessarily limited; folks with more advanced use cases should use specialized software like gparted in an environment meant for that for a better experience.
Right now if you select a disk in this screen and continue, we will try to use any free space available on the disk. If there isn't enough free space available we'll offer to shrink the FS for you. We will never overwrite data on the disk unless you tell us to.
The new ui will have a section in the first screen of the storage spoke for working with specialized disks - I don't think it's turned on in the UI for Fedora and it won't be, but it will for RHEL - that has a tabular format for working with iSCSI, hardware RAID, DASD/zFCP, and other SAN devices.
There was no message "No LVM2 structures were found" which is required in order to increase my confidence and help detect errors.
Can you tell us a little bit more about what you were looking to do here?
~m
Hi Máirín,
We don't show sda/sdb/usbN/scsi (at least if you have more than one scsi card) because those are not reliable and can change from boot-to-boot because they're assigned based on scan ordering and the order in which the relevant modules are loaded. We're very cautious about protecting users from dataloss where we can, so if a storage label is not persistent / reliable, we decided to not use it.
The hardware never mixes up the Primary IDE Master, Primary IDE Slave, Secondary IDE Master, Secondary IDE Slave. /usr/sbin/dmidecode tells all.
dmidecode also seems to work for SATA: DMI type 8, 9 bytes; Port Connector Information Internal Reference Designator: SATA4 (note the '4') Internal Connector Type: On Board IDE
I can open the box, look at the cables, read the silkscreen labels on the mainboard, [apply the mobo/BIOS errata], and read the labels/serial numbers on the drives. Surely *something* in /sys (etc.) can do the equivalent matching, even if the kernel chooses not to do so for daily operations. But install is not a daily operation, and more care is appropriate during install.
If persistence and reliability is the criterion, then drive serial numbers win; so don't hide them. And where are the facilities for dealing with UUID of partitions?
[snip]
Can you tell us a little bit more about your setup? I'm guessing it's a desktop machine, right? What kind of drives do you have in it, how do you use them? Are they all the same size and RAIDed, or does each have a different OS, or...?
This box is a common self-built mid-tower with 4 drives (2 IDE, 2 SATA) plus an ATAPI Zip drive (usually empty). There are about three dozen hard partitions. Mostly, each is the root of a different installed version: Fedora and Ubuntu, i686 and x86_64, going back many years. As a consultant, I must run what my customers run (future customers, too.) Most customers run 1 to 3 years behind the bleeding edge, and they don't run virtualized systems. The bugs are different, and I cannot afford to waste any more time chasing non-reproducible cases.
We're trying to design the UI to be as seamless as possibly for the majority of users who would use a GUI to install Fedora, which we've found is overwhelmingly laptop users who are necessarily limited to a small max bound of disks. However, we still want it to work for other cases.
I run into a similar situation in software development. The target market wants and needs a fairly simple solution, but the early adopters and gate-keepers tend to be experts who will not accept "toys".
Sometimes I have multiple drives of the same make and model, so I need to see the serial numbers, too.
We do display those if you hover over the drives. How do you know the serial number - do you open up the box and look so you are sure?
I have a paper list created during physical assembly of my own boxes, and a text file. I also have screenshots from gparted. For customer boxes, sometimes I open the box and look. I also run a LiveCD, then read syslog, and run smartctl and hdparm.
[snip]
There was no message "No LVM2 structures were found" which is required in order to increase my confidence and help detect errors.
Can you tell us a little bit more about what you were looking to do here?
I want more assurance that the installer has correctly detected the storage configuration. This part of the installer is a scout that I send on a reconnaissance mission. A good scout reports not only what was seen, but also what was checked for but not observed. That category of "I looked for it, but did not see it" is just as important as "I looked for it, and did see it."
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