Re: [sheflug] Installing (k)ubuntu 6.06

[Alex Hudson <home [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2006-08-21 at 23:05 +0100, Chris J wrote:
> > There is a text-mode installer too, but if you can't use the graphical
> > one, Ubuntu probably isn't for you. I believe Kubuntu uses the same
> > installer as Ubuntu.
> 
> The problem I have with graphical installers in general is that they make 
> things simple; I'm normally used to having almost manual control over an 
> install, so handing a lot of the control over to a wizard unnerves me
> slightly. Especially when it isn't my machine I'm installing on :-)

To be honest, people do worry about that, but I think it's unfounded.

All the Ubuntu installer is doing (from the LiveCD) is basically just
mirroring across a vanilla install onto partitions you setup, and then
running grub. So aside from getting the right language and keyboard
setup, there isn't really anything else to do since all the hardware
stuff sorts itself out when you next boot up. The text-mode alternate
installer is slightly different, but same basic end result.

When I think back to what older installers used to do, a lot of it was
needlessly complicated (e.g partitioning - you'd have to specify all the
partition IDs, start/end cylinders, etc etc...), asking questions that
don't need to be asked (by default, Ubuntu doesn't do much with the
network unless you're a dhcp client - you set that up later) and that
kind of thing. 

So, it's not like the software is trying to figure things out for you -
it either doesn't need to ask the question yet, or doesn't need to ask
the question any more. I would actually trust the current Ubuntu
installer to be a lot more reliable than the older, more complex ones.

Cheers,

Alex.


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