Installer Usability Improvements

RahulSundaram's observations notes on

http://mmcgrath.fedorapeople.org/compare/UbuntuInstall.ogg

Screen 1: Mike select's language as English. Rather drab gray menu with a long list of languages. Options are F1. Help F2. Language F3. Keymap F4. Modes F5. Accessibility F6 Other options. Fedora's initial Anaconda boot screen is not very helpful and has zero support for accessibility. We don't guide our users well

Screen 2: Once language is selected, we see a simple Ubuntu Logo on a black background. Text is white. List of centre aligned options in English. These are:


 * Try Ubuntu without any change to your computer
 * Install Ubuntu
 * Check disk for defects
 * Test memory
 * Boot from first hard disk

Some space followed by

Press F4 to select alternative start-up and installation modes

[F1-F6 options listed in screen 1]

Mike selects "Install Ubuntu" option. Fedora can do a direct installation if you pass "liveinst" or "textinst" as a Anaconda boot option in the Live CD but it is not exposed directly.

Screen 3: Progress bar followed by brown background

Screen 4: Welcome Screen where a left sidebar is used to select the language. Not sure why we are doing it twice?. Noted clearly in the bottom as Step 1/7. ?/7 is shown for a second and immediately changes to 1/7

Screen 5: Select timezone from a map, similar to Fedora. Step 2/7

Screen 6: Select keyboard layout. Step 3/7

Screen 7: Partition screen. Step 4/7. This partition screen is pretty welcoming and making the process seem simpler

Screen 6: Personal customization including your name, log-in name which is auto-filled (nice!) Password that you have to enter twice and name of the customer which is again auto-filled based on your name instead of the Fedora default of "localhost.localdomain". There is a option to "Log in automatically" followed by "Require a password to log in". Interesting, the default option is the second. I would have assume the default option would come first. Whether this is a deliberate design choice is unclear. There is no equivalent of first-boot in Ubuntu installer but this step is functionally equivalent in some ways. Step 5/7

Screen 7: A confirmation screen. Step 7/7? There seems to be step 6/7 missing.

Screen 8: A simple progress bar that shows partitioning followed by, copying files, grub-installation etc. Interesting Ubuntu installer removes a whole bunch of packages at the end. Assuming you selected English locale at step 1/7, it seems other locale packages are removed. Ubiquity, the installer removes itself.

Screen 9: Confirmation to reboot

Screen 10: During bootup, you are prompted to remove the media before the startup would continue. IIRC, Fedora does not do this.