Thanks for the feedback.

I hadn't really considered installing on a VM, so that's another scenario
to think about.

I agree that the 'filesystems' page could be better thought out and
made a bit less confusing.

The "tooltip" idea is an interesting one.  I will think about it.  Like
you say however we are always constrained by the amount of screen real estate
available.

J'

On Wed, Jan 04, 2017 at 02:18:33PM +0100, Thomas Danckaert wrote:

     I was just playing with it a bit yesterday (I built my own installation
     image according to the instructions in the manual), and tried to install
     to a qemu vm.  I also ran the installer from my git checkout (running
     ./pre-inst-env guix system installer and browsing the menus without
     actually installing anything).
     
     Here are some remarks, which perhaps mostly illustrate my own confusion,
     but might serve to make the interface easier to understand :-)
     
      - General usability: It would be nice to have something like a
        tooltip (text at the bottom of the screen?) explaining what each
        button does when it's highlighted.  It wasn't obvious to me what
        buttons such as ???Continue??? ???Back??? ???Save??? ???Write??? or ???Check??? would
        do, and which buttons were required or optional.  Maybe my
        confusion was partly caused by the fact that some buttons don't
        seem to work (see next).  This is just a suggestion, I'm not sure
        if there's room on the screen for more text.  A manual accompanying
        the interface could also help, but a self-explanatory interface is
        of course better :)
     
      - From???partition the disks???, I can only go back to the main menu by
        highlighting ???Continue??? and pressing enter/space (using the ???Back???
        button or ???B??? doesn't seem to work).  In the ???allocate disk
        partitions??? menu, the Back and Continue buttons work when I select
        them and press ???space??? or when I press ???B??? or ???C???, but not when I
        select it and use ???enter??? (this takes me back to the allocation
        menu for the currently selected disk, possibly this is intended?)
     
      - For those not used to curses-based interfaces (like me
        apparently?), some explanation of which buttons to press (enter or
        space?) could help.  Also, the shortcuts (e.g. ???B??? for back) are
        highlighted when I run the installer from my system (in my case,
        from gnome terminal), but in the tty on the VM, this highlighting
        is invisible.  What about a pure ascii way to highlight the
        shortcuts, like ???<B>ack??? and ???<C>ontinue????
     
      - When I choose a mount point for a partition and run ???check???, part
        of the check output seems to fall off the screen (see attached
        screenshot).  Is it possible to wrap the text lines so they fit in
        the screen (and maybe make the output scrollable?).
     
      - Possibly a qemu issue: the interface was rather slow to respond to
        commands on the qemu VM. Running the installer menu ???natively???
     from
        the guix source dir, everything was snappy.
     
      - Probably a qemu issue on my system: somehow I can't get networking
        to work like it says in the manual (manual says to specifiy ???-net
        default??? but my qemu complains this option doesn't exist, I have to
        use ???-net user???, but then don't seem to get a network in the VM
     :-/
        ) , and the networking setup crashes the installer (???Command
        failed: no such device (-19)???) and causes a renewed automatic login.
     
     Because of the networking issue in my VM, I couldn't proceed with the
     actual installation.  Will report back if/when I solve it.
     
     Thomas



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