[EN] Installer in Siduction is not easy to follow

[geo33]

Hi!
I'm pleased to be able to return to using Linux after a 3 year hiatus. Its great to see that Siduction is closely following SID and Debian, and is community driven. I very much appreciate that philosophy: I hope to support Debian as so many other sub-branches depend so strongly on its development. Also, I support the idea of a community-driven distro, rather than one that is driven by purely commercial interests. Far too many aspects of our lives are now commercialized. "Community" seems long-forgotten.

So I hope to use Siduction and see it adopted by larger number of users. It seems to be one of the only Debian rolling releases that is based on cutting-edge SID.

However, the installer is not really the easiest thing to follow. I recently installed Bodhi x64, Linux Mint x64 Cinnamon, and Linux Mint LMDE x64 in VirtualBox to test them. The installation proceeded in a very straightforward manner. But when I went to install Siduction, I quickly became confused.

The installer section "The Root File System" is mystifying. In the upper box, the user is asked to choose a partition where the root file system will be created. This seems clear enough.
But why is there a lower box which displays "Partition Info"? It it necessary to select something here?

In "Mountpoing Definitions" There is offered the option to set the Mount Point for /home. Why are the mount point dialogues not all clearly displayed in a distinct list as they are in Mint? In Mint, the user partitions the disk, and then sets the mount point. This is a clear and straightforward process. But in the Siduction installer, this is rather confusing.

After studying the installer for quite some time, I finally managed to figure to proceed. I tried to install Siduction x64 KDE and Siduction x386 XFCE and ran into many problems. I eventually managed to succeed in installing Siduction x386 XFCE. The problems I encountered are included in the post http://forum.siduction.org/index.php?topic=3843
I have no idea how I managed to finally succeed in installing Siduction x386 XFCE, but now it works. However, installation of Siduction X64 has failed repeatedly at the 60% mark when copying files.

Although I am quite a novice at Linux, it seems that the installer in Siduction is not very easy to use. Also, some of the wording/phrasing is not clear as to what is happening, or how to proceed. Since I can't code, perhaps I can help re-write the instructions and explanations that appear in the installer. I'd be pleased to do something to help.

Thanks for this great distribution! But I do hope to see the installer re-worked to make it easier to understand.

[dibl]

Hi geo33 -- welcome to the forum, and thanks for your feedback on the installer.

I will offer a couple of comments:

- siduction is really not an appropriate Linux distribution for use by a novice, due to the inherent instability of the Debian sid repo, and the need for some special handling of package updates.  (We are glad you are giving it a try anyway!)  So this means the siduction installer is not designed for the same user group as the mint installer -- although ease of use is always desirable, for sure.

- "Easy" and "not easy" are extremely subjective, and seem different to each individual.  We don't hear a lot of complaints about the installer, although once in awhile someone runs into trouble with it, like you did, apparently. The dev team do incorporate improvements in the installer periodically -- it has changed quite a lot in the past 2 years, so I'm sure your input will be given serious consideration.

- I personally have used the siduction installer about 8 or 9 times during the past 2 years, on both 32-bit and 64-bit hardware, and each time it worked flawlessly.  I always use Parted Magic to do partitioning in advance of installing, so that may help (I know it helps me).

Thanks again for your feedback, and please feel free to ask any questions on this forum.  Also we recommend you give the manual a review, especially if you have issues with video drivers, and for sure the package management section.

[geo33]

Hi dibl! Thanks very much for your reply!

-  I'm aware that siduction is not really the best distribution for a novice (which I guess I am), but I did manage to keep Sidux running a my primary OS for about 3 years, with Win XP installed as a guest OS in Virtualbox. I had to give it up (I had too many academic software applications that were not running properly in WINE and my Windows VM wasn't working well either). But now I want to try again!

I want to use a Debian-based system, and one that does not stray from Debian. I believe, rightly or wrongly, that branches that fork from Debian, but do not contribute greatly to its advancement, are not really helping things at the core. For this reason, I want to use a system like Siduction. Currently I'm experimenting with a) Siduction; b) Mint Debian Edition in VirtualBox on my Windows 7 machine.

My "grand plan" is once again to run Siduction as my main OS, and run Windows 7 as a guest OS within Virtualbox.

- Yes, very good point. "Easy" and "Not Easy" are highly subjective. It just seemed that having just easily installed Mint LMDE and Solydx, the installer on Siduction seemed opaque and unclear. But if there are indeed few complaints, then the problem would seem to be with my lack of understanding.

I'll re-read the manual and try again!

[dibl]

However, installation of Siduction X64 has failed repeatedly at the 60% mark when copying files.

That issue often is caused by a defect in the downloaded image file, or the burn of a CD.  You might want to download it again, and/or verify the md5 sum.