Introduction

Overview of open issues and things to be done for the ["DebianInstaller/GUI"].

A complete list of bugs affecting the g-i can be found in the [http://bugs.debian.org/cdebconf-gtk-udeb bug reports against cdebconf-gtk-udeb] page.

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Per-architecture issues

We're trying to schematize bugs affecting the g-i on a per-architecture base, architectures considered here are i386, PPC, AMD64 .

i386 specific

• No known bugs affecting i386 is known ATM

AMD64 specific

• solve the console switching problem on AMD64 [http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=373253 #373253]

PPC specific

PPC is the most problematic architecture of the three to be supported because ?DirectFrameBuffer seems particulary willing to crash on those machines (we currently experienced more failures that successes) Right now HW acceleration provided by DFB seems to be broken for almost every suported video chipset on PPCs, so it was forced off by default. Reported successes, even those which do not rewuire directfbrc to be tweaked, could not be reproduced with a straight boot into the graphical installer, but testers had to boot textual and then switch graphical. Read also this long [http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=342053 thread] about the g-i on PPC machines.

• An endianness color [http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=341770 issue] for powerpc was experienced some times ago with DFB 0.9.22, but it seems it was fixed in 0.9.25

• The list selection is invisible bug seems to be gone on both radeon 9800 and 9200 on pegasos, when using disable-module=radeon.
• Going to the console on pegasos/radeon9200 leaves a garbagy font. Using disable-modules=radeon fixes this issue.

TODO

Porting

The graphical version of the installer is currently available for Intel x86, AMD64 and PowerPC. The PowerPC port [http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=341597 needs work] to get different types of system correctly supported. Other architectures the graphical installer could be ported to include Sparc, Alpha and HPPA.

Fonts

For font information, please see ["DebianInstaller/GUIFonts"]

Usability

• Screen resolution.
  • Currently fixed at 800x600. Should be made flexible (adapt to resolution set by system or user).
  • Interface should adapt itself so that text blocks are never too wide for optimal readability.

• Improve accessability (for the visually handicapped). One way to do this is to [http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=339735 support different themes] (color schemes). (Note: should not lead to a major increase in initrd size.)

• Progress bar in separate window.
• Alternative (graphical) ways to start a shell or browse log files.
• Interface design.
• Create custom plug-ins for cdebconf to improve handling of some dialogs and make optimal use of possibilities offered by the graphical environment.

Interface design

Most of the work on the graphical side has been done by Eduardo Silva. He has set up a [http://www.geocities.com/jobezone/d-i_gtk.html webpage] with images he designed and some comments about possible future changes.

Reduce size of initrds

The initrds are currently very large which also results in fairly high memory requirements to run the graphical installer. Size has thus far not been a major concern, our focus has been on getting things working.

Options to reduce initrd size.

• Library reduction for graphical libraries.
• Remove unused files from udebs.
• Reduction of space used by fonts (see above).

Update The size of the initrds is now down to around 10MB. Further reduction would be nice, but it is no longer a major issue.