Though the earlier screen had told him that his selection would affect his location he was still at the same place, in front of his old PC.
The next dialog asked him about his "Keymap" which seemed to be something similar to a keyboard layout, which actually should have been affected by is former selection but apparently was not.
So he selected American English again and went on.
The next things were quite familiar. Some hardware detection happened and some components were loaded. This was fine with him.
Network Configuration
The hardware detection seemed to be successful and he was prompted to enter a hostname. The next familiar thing he thought and as it actually was his Debian system he stuck to the default.
Some more hardware detection happened and afterwards he was prompted to do some partitioning.
Partitioning
He had seen such thing before and never really understood them. But it didn't matter as he just had deleted his Windows 98 with fdisk.
So he thought it would be a good idea to stay with the installer and let him do the work. Manually was something he didn't like, anyways.
Though he had an idea of what a home directory might be he was quite unsure and used the given recommendation.
A "mount point" wasn't that much help to him, but as the installer had done it it was OK with him.
The only thing that confused him a bit was the lightning symbol next to his "primary" partition. He decided to just stick to the smiley next to it and go on. The other words weren't that much use to him as he had never heard something about "swap" or "ext3".
Then he noticed the two exclamation marks at the top of the screen. Were they a sign for an error? He couldn't remember if the had been there before or not.
He got a little bit worried. Two possible error signs on one screen. But as he was using his test computer, he felt safe and decided just to go on.
Despite his worried mind he got to a new screen. The creation of file systems sounded like a good thing to him and as he hadn't any important data on his computer he decided to go on.
Base Installation
Now the things got really going on. The system was doing something like installing a base system. This seemed to take some time, so he went out for a smoke.
When he came back a nightmare awaited him...
GRUB Configuration
He read the appearing thing twice, but this didn't make it all clear to him.
He would have wished for a choice between different options in opposite to entering some cryptic stuff that he didn't really understand.
If he had kept another OS on his machine what would this dialog have to offer to him? he thought.
But as he was quite sure that going with the defaults was a good idea he didn't touch this bad magic and just selected continue.
Though he didn't know how he would have created a boot floppy during his way through the installation he took the CD out of his drive and continued.
After the reboot he was presented with a small menu that offered him something that looked like the normal system and something that had "recovery mode" in parentheses around it.
He decided to use the standard and got again a whole bunch of lines of funny things he didn't understand. "Quite a lot of stuff I don't understand today" he thought.
Something that said something about an error and about PCMCIA drew his attention. He thought that PCMCIA was something for Notebooks and his old home PC was not a notebook, so why in hell was this stuff even installed.
After the first Boot
After that he was greeted with a nice and friendly welcome screen which congratulated him for his new Debian System. Another screen asked him about his Time Zone and as his system with the defaults had worked till now he stuck to the defaults.
He did some other quite familiar things like entering the Administrator or so called root password and created himself a Bob User account with the short name bob. Afterwards he configured apt (the Debian Package management tool) to use one of his local mirrors, as he had a broadband internet access and didn't want to play CD jay. This seemed to work out of the box. After he had confirmed that he didn't want to add other sources because 12000 packages seemed enough for him he selected that he wants to have security updates which always seemed to be a good idea. Afterwards he selected the package installation. He added something like a Desktop to his installation using the task based selection tool as he actually wanted to use his machine as a desktop and continued to the installation. The tool informed him that it will install about 1GB of software and started a download process. As this seemed to take some time he decided for another cigarette.
As he got back to his machine he found himself asked a whole bunch of questions, regarding his video hardware , his default dictionary and stuff like if he want's to take part in a "popularity contest". He was quite sure that he didn't want to and answered all the questions as good as he could. After he had finished answering this questions the system started to do a lot of unpacking.
And he lived happily ever after... (to be continued ?)
Notes
- I know that there is a install manual that would have helped Bob.
- After the first reboot the capture feature of Vmware left me so I couldn't provide screenshots
- I hope I did a reasonably good job in denying my knowledge and feeling like Bob
- My two main points of criticism are:
- the first screen, s/boot/start installation/
- the grub config, this should be a select dialog and only a custom switch should offer to enter it by hand.
- This page was done with NVU, as I didn't want to waste time with layouting
- The spell checking feature of NVU doesn't work yet, so just ignore any typographical rules
- I haven't tested the hardware detection capabilities as
this would be better on a real system and this is just for
usability
Author
If you got any questions, suggestions or something else interesting mail me at marcus@thiesen.org