Fedora install support for netbooks -- small screen size

[Adam Jackson]

On Wed, 2010-01-06 at 12:26 -0500, Fulko Hew wrote:

> Auto-scroll bar's would at least make it possible to work (even if its
> inconvenient); but without it, it's _impossible_ to use.
> 
> The only alternative would be to re-design the UI based on expected
> hardware limitations.

It's funny you should say that.

We've had 800x600 as the expected minimum for _years_.  Like, since it
was called Red Hat Linux.  It's not even a particularly egregious
assumption, that's the fallback resolution for Windows 2k and later, and
it's the Gnome HIG minimum design size.

That's why anaconda has a fixed-size UI, and why that fixed size happens
to be 800x600.

And it turns out that trying to make a UI like that - disk partitioning
in particular - that scales well to arbitrary screen sizes is actually
pretty dang impossible.  This is why the text mode installer got cut
down, so that it now basically only has "I'm going to install now, try
and stop me".  You just can't represent enough information in that
little space.  And the same is probably true of the netbook install
experience too.  You don't care about partitioning, you don't care about
multiboot, you just want the OS on the machine dangit.

That's a far better experience than throwing up some scrollbars and
hoping.

- ajax

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