Fedora 7 Anaconda feedback

[Dimi Paun]

Hi folks,

Congrats on the Fedora 7 release, it's quite nice. Here are a few
notes about the install/anacoda experience from my perspective.

Few things to keep in mind:
  * I am a experienced hacker that's lazy and wants to behave
    like a newbie from time to time (and during installation it's 
    one of those times)
  * I have only one Linux distro on my box, Fedora 6 in this case,
   which I keep as close to standard as possible

And now for my observations:
  * the general experience is nice and pleasant, congrats!
  * on the Install/Upgrade screen, why is "Install" selected
    by default when the program already detected that I have
    only _one_ image installed. This forces the user to override
    an option that can be pretty automatic for most people.
  * on the boot-loader screen, first 2 choices where disabled
    (for reasons that I did not understand). And since I was
    running Grub before (which came standard with Fedora), why
    ask me what do so here, and not just upgrade as required?!?
  * the advanced config for bootloader checkbox was on by default,
    and that took me to a new screen (I think it's new in this
    version), that would make even a grown man cry. Do I want the
    bootloader in MBR or funny looking LVM-related location?
    Beats me! The entire screen was cryptic at best, and this
    from a long-time Linux hacker! Why subject people to this
    screen by default?
  * after upgrade, the new system failed to boot -- the horror!
    It was simple to fix, the default grub entry was still
    pointed to the old kernel image that got nuked, so I had
    to manually pick the other, newer image, and then edit
    /etc/grub.conf by hand. Never experienced this before.
  * postgres got upgraded (yay!) only to find out that it will
    not start anymore due to format incompatibility, and I had
    to do a dump/restore. But how to do so if the database
    refuses to load?!? At the very least the installer should
    have detected the condition and warn me to do the dump
    before the install, at best it would do the dump/restore
    automagically.

I know I am being picky, but anaconda is now such a nice application
that the bar is quite high. Good work!

-- 
Dimi Paun <dimi at lattica.com>
Lattica, Inc.