Tried installing 3.0 beta over a Mandriva Cooker system today. Mageia-3-beta1-x86_64-DVD.iso
Some notes. Mostly about problems because I never got to see a working system, so the tone is probably more negative than I'd like. On boot, there was a long delay followed by "Loading program" and a progress bar appearing and disappearing again almost before I had time to read the message. This didn't seem optimal. Choice of keyboard - there was a link to wikipedia in the Help text, but it gave me an error that there was no network. There are two entries for US Keyboard with no obvious reason, and a third for US International (which I chose since I'm not in the US :-)) I have 2 disk drives. the installer wanted to use the spare space on my Windows drive, when the other drive already had Linux. Yes, I could choose from the drop-down, but it wasn't clear that I was choosing where to put Mageia. Suggest add, Multiple disk drives found. Choose which one you want to use for the main Mageia system. The disk was formatted. That was actually what I wanted, in this case, but please add a warning that data will be lost - most humans on the planet won't know that. There's no indication of how long the formatting will take, or how much has been done. I'll leave it running for an hour or two (it's a 250G SATA hard drive) and see if it finishes, or maybe it crashed. Please add a note that this may take a long time, preferably with an OK/Cancel/Skip since (1) it wasn't needed here, and (2) users may well give it a minute or so and then move on to the next Linux distribution on the magazine, saying "Mageia hung my computer, it's crap." Suggest progress bar or at least some quotes from Moliére. Note: eventually the bad block scan started giving a progress percentage on another virtual terminal, but most users won't find that, of course, even if they wait half an hour or more for it to begin. I'm assuming the graphics and ugly font are not final. If they are, the pink stripes look like an error. Maybe caused by running my monitor (1920x1200/"deep colour") in 800x600 16-bit mode. The long list of packages being installed - would be nicer to show the name of the current package, and its description, and more slowly to show a more detailed description of just one program. If there was a clear and obvious option to choose the LCD's native resolution, a font like Matthew Carter's Bitstream Charter Italic would look more sophisticated and also get more information on a line. Choosing a desktop - help said "broken link" Choosing a desktop - please add versions, not just KDE, GNOME, Other. Also, I might want both KDE and GNOME installed, so I don't want to choose just one and not the other. If I'll get a chance to install more desktops later in the installer, please say so more clearly, not buried in help (once the link to help is fixed)... The installer seems much slower than it used to be, but maybe that's changes in rpm? Three hours to install packages is a long time. Although having said that, maybe the estimates were just wrong. At the end, several hours later, the DVD is ejected and the system tries to reboot... PANIC cannot mount proc on /proc! Compile the kernel with CONFIG_PROC_FS! Hmm. Well, I saw something go by about this on the mailing list so maybe I can fix it without another 7-hour download of the DVD image. Overall, though, the installer needs a huge injection of "slickness". It's_almost_ there, but in graphic design "almost" doesn't get you a cigar. Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
