Forgive me, this is going to be long ...
I made a few attempts at creating a new virtual machine and installing
the preview. It was a bit rough around the edges, especially from a new
user perspective. If it took me a few tries to get things installed
then something is amiss.
Below are some usability notes I took as I scrapped what I had and
restarted from scratch. I know I'm going to be off the mark on some
things based on my inexperience.
Booting the ISO: The default timeout of 5 seconds before booting the
Live Environment mode is way too short. A new user would want to read
the screen to see the options; right now it will start booting to the
live environment and confuse them.
Install to harddisk:
(My drive was not partitioned or formatted yet.)
Welcome to FreeDOS 1.1 Setup
Destination: checking if FDISK can detect any harddisks
This check correctly found the hard drive with no partitions. But the
screen cleared too quickly; there should be a pause to show the results
of the fdisk check.
The next screen allows you to run FDISK to modify the hard drive
partition table or load additional drivers for optical drives. It tells
you installation will continue in 15 seconds. Once again that is too
fast, and there is no count-down timer to show you that the clock is
ticking. There is also no way to pause it if you need additional time
to read or decide.
Running FDISK was uneventful. But after FDISK exited it went back to
the previous screen ("run FDISK or load optical drivers"). FDISK gives
a warning about needing a reboot but does not enforce that. The install
script should terminate by telling the user that the machine is going to
be rebooted to restart the installation and actually reboot the machine
once the user acknowledges it. (No count-down timers!)
(At this point I forced a reboot to make my partitioning changes stick.)
Resuming where I left off ...
Mysterious "a" and "1" appear after the 15 second period. Next comes a
prompt about "Buffering installation files, press N to skip:" There is
no explanation about what is going to be buffered, or what the
ramifications are of saying "no". There appears to be a timeout period
that but it is not stated, and there is no countdown.
Next the RAM disk program runs and creates a drive (G: in my case), but
all of the operations to create directories and copy files to G: fail.
All of the messages are out there - it looks really ugly and would scare
the hell out of somebody. (I'm not a newbie but even I felt the need to
stop and debug what just happened, not realizing that the failures did
not affect the ability to install.) Any operation to drive G: gave an
"Out of memory error."
The last prompt said:
Type E:\Setup to start installation of FreeDOS 1.1.
Batchfile 'D:\AUTOEXEC.BAT' not found.
Again, not confidence inspiring. D: was completely empty - I am not
sure what is supposed to be there.
Starting the install with E:\Setup ...
After selecting the language there was a foul stream of "Run chkdsk: Bad
FAT I/O: 0x00000001" messages before the installer cleared the screen
and reported that the drive need formatting. The latter part was good,
but the foul stream of error messages really should be hidden. (And
whatever caused them needs to only show one message at most, not the
same message over and over.)
It tells me that it is going to create a FAT32 filesystem. I formatted
the drive to be FAT16. I suspect this is an error in the message text,
and that it really didn't check the partition type.
The user should get a chance to review the messages from the format ...
there is no pause.
Continuing with the installation ....
"2) Change installation mode" should tell you what the current mode is.
It should also be above "1) Start installation of FreeDOS 1.1 Final",
forcing the user to read through it and consider it. The screen has
plenty of room for help text as the user moves through the menu options.
Selecting option 1, a mysterious "Syntax Error" appeared on a blank
screen before continuing. Not confidence inspiring.
The package selection screens should have some basic help - using the
arrows to move, 'X' means selected, etc. "Boot" was missing a
description - the rest were fairly spartan. "Done" probably should be
"Continue to the next step."
Second package selection screen: Everything has an 'x' at the end of it
which makes the 'x' kind of meaningless. If the description is too long
it corrupts the right border with extraneous letters instead of
continuing on the next line. (Dosfsckx does continue to the next line,
but the screen formatting is borked.)
Once again, "Done" should be "Continue to the next step". And that
should provide a warning that package selection is done and file copying
is about to start. (And there should be an option to go back and alter
if there are last minute doubts.)
After what looks like to be a complete file copying stream another
package selection screen comes up with SYSLNXX. If this is not out of
order then there should be some text explaining why it is there after
all of the other files were copied. This goes on for a few packages
including a shell, WATTCPX, misc utilities, etc. Are these all
considered optional and hence the post-install type approach?
The status updates at the end "Menu step 1 through 6" update in a
confusing way ... how about just one line of output each time a step
completes? It keeps clearing the screen which makes it hard to see what
it is doing.
Next comes the bootsector fixup. I'm not sure if this is because I
installed SYSLINUX or if this is going to happen as part of a normal
install. If this is SYSLINUX specific it should be made obvious that
this is an optional step related to SYSLINUX being installed as an
optional package. It does correctly save the boot sector; is that file
location in an installation log somewhere? (Is there an installation
log?) I would like to see those options in an installer type screen,
complete with help text as you scroll through the options. (I opted to
have SYSLINUX do nothing to the boot sector - it worked. I suspect that
is because FreeDOS formatted the drive.)
Upon rebooting FreeDOS wanted me to select boot options from a menu (0
to 4) but the menu options were missing. I've seen them before, so this
is just an oversight.
I took a quick look around and went straight for mTCP (of course). I'd
like to provide a more detailed configuration file that includes some
default options commented out. That would make it a lot more obvious to
somebody who is picking it up and looking at it for the first time.
(And I plan on test driving other install options and packages ...)
I hope this hasn't been too much of a downer. I'm kind of crazed about
user experience, and if the install is smooth it makes it much easier
for newbies to test drive. We have a great window of opportunity here -
any new machine can run VMWare and VirtualBox quite well. That makes a
great opening for people to be able to play with FreeDOS without having
an older dedicated machine.
Mike
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