Debian Usability Research

[Enrico Zini]

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On Mon, Apr 21, 2003 at 04:30:54PM +0200, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:

> > What would a Debian Usability project do?
> What about looking at the new installer, and give suggestions to how
> it can be made easier to understand and user for new users?

Good one.  As you can probably see, I'm pretty busy with many other
things; however I hope someone picks this one up and starts working on
it.

Before giving suggestions on how it can be made easier for new users,
however, it is of primary importance to understand who is actually going
to use it, and how.

For example, a *really* new and occasional user is likely to try the
distro from a CD found in some computer review.  For that kind of
target, the installer is maybe the worst tool to use, as it would be
preferable to ship a Knoppix or Morphix style live CD with a good
on-disk installer that produces a clean debian system and there you go:
it couldn't be made easier, no matter how you try!

When those live-cd debians will start to produce good and clean debian
systems once on disk, no newbie and desktop oriented people will ever
need the installer.  This would mean that the people working at it
won't need to focus on new and inexperienced users, but should instead
concentrate on a more complex but complete and flexible system.

Some other experienced people would maybe boot a Knoppix and create an
on-disk Debian with debootstrap, chroot into it, dpkg --set-selection
=66rom somewhere and that's all.

Many install methods have popped up from time to time, and maybe the
role of an installer is not anymore what it used to be.

Is there someone who could conduct some study on this?


Yours truly,

Enrico

--
GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico@debian.org>

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