Sweet, sweet, Ice cream. It really is a fantastic idea to have all the computers in a lab interlinked so the work of compiling is shared out between them all, allowing work to be done in fraction of the time without the need for massively expensive supercomputer. The distributed compile farm is taking form, we even have a pretty graph projected on the wall showing the various nodes and connections which lights up like some kind of bizarre disco light show when things are compiling.

Large chunks of yesterday were spent installing Novell SLED and a large chunk of today was spent installing Kubuntu. I now really wish I knew how to set up a local Debian package repository and a little more about imaging local machines as it would have made our task a lot easier but unfortunately no experienced administrators were hiding in our little group (although we did get excellent help sorting out the printings and getting CUPS sorted).

The Kubuntu CD is ideal for demonstrations and it is a vast improvement now that the same CD works both as a Live CD and an install CD in one. Unfortunately it included far too little software for our needs and a lot of time was spent updating it into what we hope will be an environment suitable for developers. The Novell DVD was significantly easier. Neither include KOffice, Kubuntu does at least include Krita.

Many hours of using KDE turned up many annoyances and hopefully a few usability lessons too. Probably the strangest annoyance was that after choosing to "Log out" I was then asked to "End Session" (amongst other options) but all I wanted was to "Log out". I may not be describing it very well but I hope you can understand how "End Session" does not exactly follow from "Log off" and how it might be confusing.

The computer lab is totally locked down, all wires are firmly attached to the desk so borrowing a mouse from another computer is not an option. The Kubuntu installer was mostly keyboard accessible. The partition manager was entirely keyboard inaccessible and I could go no further. That wasn't the only problem with the partition manager, it had an annoying tendency to default to MB instead of GB. All the machines we were dealing with had two partitions, with Windows on the first which we were required to leave alone and a second partition we could wipe and install what we needed. The installer from Novell was a little convoluted but we were able to point it at the second partition and leave it to take care of the rest. Maybe we didn't choose the best options but the Kubuntu installer required us to manually partition and also create a swap partition. It wasn't so bad except for the number of times we were repeating the process and again the number of times we were forced to repeat the process because of small mistakes made.

Even when we were able to get KDE installed the display didn't work correctly and in a few cases we were stuck with 640x480. If we cannot get these machines setup correctly hopefully developers who were pushing for a much larger default size will try out these machines and get an idea of how difficult it is to use KDE on smaller displays. Now we can add "reconfiguring machines" to the list of reasons why it is important to work on small displays. (The outer scrollbars which were forced on applications help make things just barely usable rather than entirely unusable.)


Optimize for the base case

Having spent the best part of two days staring at installers from both Novell and Kubuntu I am more sure than ever of the need to review the usability and fully overhaul the design of these installers. Ideally things should be made more consistent across different distributions. (From my earlier experiments I also have quite a bit of experience with Anaconda installer from RedHat, as well as the Progeny Debian installer. The Mandrake installer has changed around a bit more than others but I have a rough knowledge of it too.)
I have thought about this subject before but I am now more certain than ever that these installers are going about things in the wrong order and asking far far too many stupid questions.

One of the best features of the current installers is a world map, which allows you to click on a red dot representing a major city. The city targets are a little small and awkward but they do provide a quick way to specify location and time zone.
Most (all?) installers suffer a chicken and egg problem in that before they can even ask what language you might want they must first pick a language in which to ask the question! It would be far better to start off with the world map and have users pick the location before anything else. Not only is the map easily understood irrespective of language or even literacy, once the user has chosen a location there is so much more than can be inferred and a lot of irrelevant choices can be hidden.
Once a location has been chosen then there are many locale settings which can be set to their defaults without further questions. It is a safe assumption that an archetypal user living in Helsinki is most likely to want to choose from only a very short list of available languages such as Finnish or Swedish* and all other choices could be hidden. There would of course need to be some other way provided to view the full language list for say foreign students who might studying in Helsinki but want to install things in English.
It makes sense to optimise for the base case: make the simple things easy and make the difficult things possible.


When I wasn't having my brain melted by repeatedly installing the same software over and over again we had a short training session which essentially explained how not to break the very expensive multimedia equipment. The time spent in the lecture theatre made me rethink the problems we might face. I then drafted a list of advice and recommendations urging speakers to prepare various type of backups in case the equipment doesn't work as planned. Tomorrow we should be able to bang that draft into better shape and send it out to speakers as part of the instructions we need to give them.

Hope for the best, plan for the worst. I am really looking forward to Akademy.


* No offense intended to other languages spoken in Finland.