Re: SEUL: Partitioning

[Thomas Molesworth <thomas@bass.almac.co.uk>]

On Mon, 30 Jun 1997, Luka wrote:

> i agree with jay's point on the loopback idea. (won't restate them:)
> 
> and i'd like to (re?)suggest the idea of a seul demo of some sort.

I agree! A demo running under WinXX/DOS/whatever would be A Good Thing (tm),
but we need something to demo first.

> rather than doing an actual trial installation, which is ridden
> with technical issues, and may actually not gain us real users in the end,
> i think a productive investment of effort would be (once we have
> a product) to produce a demoreel of some sort that runs under various
> platforms, and gives a good preview of what to expect after going through
> [what the user may (despite our best efforts) view as] installation hell.

It could also act as a tutorial.

> in summary, marketing wins.  i suggest doing things in the following order:
              ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Good point.

0. define end user

> 1. make a product, and make it the real thing.
>    the top priority should be that a full-blown, fast,
>    what-linux-was-meant-to-be installation will work well.

don't forget bullet-proof (and idiot-proof, and windows-proof)

> 2. marketing
>    make demos. and this may include actually building something
>    that runs under loopback the way described, but it really is
>    just for trial, and should give the feel of a demo.

The demo should be a slideshow, hands-free operation, which will run under
the Other Operating Systems, so that the user does not have to configure
Linux just to see the demo.
A loopback demo could be provided for users who are still interested (10-20
Mb image file w/loadlin+kernel)

>    the point is to make the user want to install linux for real,
>    not to have any easy way to uninstall.

Uninstall should not be too prominent, but there nonetheless (and if the
user has installed it with partitions, etc, then this should remove the
Linux partitions and put everything back to how it was).

> 3. extra stuff.
>    maybe some of you really dig this loopback idea, and think you can
>    code it.  if so, go for it.  more extensions to linux are always good
>    to have around.  get in touch with umsdos-people and others who've
>    done this sort of thing, and work on something appropriate.
>    when it's ready, get it integrated into distributions.

I like the idea so much I'm going to try and install it on an older system
here, I'll post back any results I get. I believe the loopback idea would be
useful as an install option (possibly for advanced users?) simply because
there will always be systems where the user does not want (or is unable)
to repartition the disk. umsdos is too slow (for me, anyway), and I haven't
tried uvfat but it seems that vfat is such a badly thought-out idea that it
would be even slower (does it really use a seperate fat entry for every 13
characters of the filename?)

--
Thomas Molesworth            (thomas@bass.almac.co.uk)

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