I just spent about 90 minutes going through Test3, starting with the Gnome LiveCD and working my way through installation, firstboot, and login. I tried to relive my days as a QA engineer and adopt the mindset of a user who isn't deeply technical, and as a user who becomes uncomfortable at anything that doesn't seem to "just work" the way it's expected to.
I have a number of suggestions and straight bugs. I don't have the time to open bugzillas for all of these.
Most of this is LiveCD stuff, but some of it is general QA.
Will -- I'm going to leave it up to you to file Bugzillas, etc. as appropriate.
--Max
======================
Booting the LiveCD, grub gives you two options:
Fedora-7-Test3-Live-i386 Fedora-7-Test3-Live-i386 from RAM
This is confusing -- should I choose default or no? What's the difference between the two? I think users will be confused.
======================
The default user name at the Live CD's gdm -- this is a simple change
s/Fedora live CD/Fedora/
then if it's a LiveUSB or LiveDVD, the user name doesn't look odd
======================
First impressions of the LiveCD desktop
We want it to be uncluttered, and to show off the coolest stuff in the most obvious way. To that end: - do we need the SCIM module in the top right? - do we need the Desktop search module in the top right?
What about the default applications at the top of the GNOME panel? - now: evolution, web browser
Why not also add some useful/common apps: - instant messenger - the gimp - abiword
======================
Firefox
- We need a default homepage for Firefox that isn't just the generic firefox page.
- We need to update the default bookmarks for Firefox in F7. There's actually a wiki page where we're working on the list. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/7/Bookmarks
======================
I tried every single application under "Applications", "Places", and "System". It was a disappointing experience. Has anyone else done this, both for the liveCD and/or for the actual installed distro?
- abiword crashes on startup
- "calendar" in the office section is actually Evolution and it crashes when you close it - "email" in the top launcher is also Evolution, and it too crashes (obviously) when you close it. - "tasks" in the office section -- same thing - so shouldn't it just have one more generalized name?
- "Other->Theme Installer" doesn't do anything, and should be removed
- CD Player takes a long time to boot, and then locks/crashes
- "Places->Network" crashes when you close it and takes down the whole gnome panel, which restarts
- "System->Administration->Logical Volume Manager" gives "unknown error" on startup.
- "System->About Fedora" can't load properly due to missing about-fedora.xml
======================
Trying out the installer
The "restart" button at the end of the anaconda/install window didn't work, and I had to manually restart the machine from Gnome's system menu.
After rebooting.....
"License Information" in Firstboot
- Can we make the text box smaller, to better fit the text that is in it?
- Either the "Forward" button should say "Understood, please proceed" or the place in the grey where it says "Understood, please proceed" should simply be gone. It looks dumb.
"Hardware Profile" screen in Firstboot.
Let's clean up the text. It's quite wordy, and contains incorrect capitalizations.
"Smolt is a hardware profiler for the Fedora Project. Submitting your profile helps focus our efforts on pupular hardware and platforms. All submissions are anonymous."
The last part "Sending your profile will enable a monthly update" -- I assume that means that if you send your profile *now* it will send an updated version of it every month. Is that right? Can the user disable that easily?
I forgot to look, but we must make sure that the default choice is "do not send".
On Wednesday 04 April 2007 11:46:07 Max Spevack wrote:
======================
First impressions of the LiveCD desktop
We want it to be uncluttered, and to show off the coolest stuff in the most obvious way. To that end: - do we need the SCIM module in the top right? - do we need the Desktop search module in the top right?
What about the default applications at the top of the GNOME panel? - now: evolution, web browser
Why not also add some useful/common apps: - instant messenger - the gimp - abiword
We want the Live desktop to be the same as the installed Desktop. Therefor these types of thoughts need to go to the general desktop. We really really want the environment on Live to be as close if not the same as the installed system.
======================
Firefox
- We need a default homepage for Firefox that isn't just the generic
firefox page.
The very first time you launch FF you get their screen, I don't know if there is a way around it.
- We need to update the default bookmarks for Firefox in F7. There's
actually a wiki page where we're working on the list. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/7/Bookmarks
There was a bug in FF that it wasn't loading the bookmarks right, I do believe that has been fixed in rawhide. It should show the release notes by default.
On Wed, 2007-04-04 at 11:46 -0400, Max Spevack wrote:
Will -- I'm going to leave it up to you to file Bugzillas, etc. as appropriate.
Here's a quick once-over of the stuff you mentioned. I'll look at the rest in more detail, but here's what I know off the top of my head:
First impressions of the LiveCD desktop
We want it to be uncluttered, and to show off the coolest stuff in the most obvious way. To that end:
- do we need the SCIM module in the top right?
- do we need the Desktop search module in the top right?
For that matter - shouldn't we pre-populate the image with index data if we're going to include Beagle?
- We need a default homepage for Firefox that isn't just the generic
firefox page.
IIRC this is coming (as with the "Welcome to Fedora Core 6!" page) soon. Although I'm not sure if we have/want a LiveCD specific one.
I tried every single application under "Applications", "Places", and "System". It was a disappointing experience. Has anyone else done this, both for the liveCD and/or for the actual installed distro?
- abiword crashes on startup
Yep. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/234765 Added to the LiveCD tracker: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/showdependencytree.cgi?id=Fedora7LiveCD
- "System->About Fedora" can't load properly due to missing about-fedora.xml
Again, I believe this is coming along with the bookmarks and Firefox start page.. Actually I thought we had a placeholder there now. Did it get dropped from the LiveCD?
Trying out the installer
The "restart" button at the end of the anaconda/install window didn't work, and I had to manually restart the machine from Gnome's system menu.
That's a known bug: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/225168 It's on the F7 LiveCD tracker.
"Smolt is a hardware profiler for the Fedora Project. Submitting your profile helps focus our efforts on pupular hardware and platforms. All submissions are anonymous."
[...]
I forgot to look, but we must make sure that the default choice is "do not send".
It is.
-w
On Wed, 2007-04-04 at 12:08 -0400, Will Woods wrote:
On Wed, 2007-04-04 at 11:46 -0400, Max Spevack wrote:
First impressions of the LiveCD desktop
We want it to be uncluttered, and to show off the coolest stuff in the most obvious way. To that end:
- do we need the SCIM module in the top right?
- do we need the Desktop search module in the top right?
For that matter - shouldn't we pre-populate the image with index data if we're going to include Beagle?
If there were an easy way to do so, it'd be worth considering but the data is per-user I believe. And the user is actually created at boot time.
- We need a default homepage for Firefox that isn't just the generic
firefox page.
IIRC this is coming (as with the "Welcome to Fedora Core 6!" page) soon. Although I'm not sure if we have/want a LiveCD specific one.
Personally, I'd prefer to keep them the same. Which means we should include a little bit that's about the live CD in the default page probably.
- "System->About Fedora" can't load properly due to missing about-fedora.xml
Again, I believe this is coming along with the bookmarks and Firefox start page.. Actually I thought we had a placeholder there now. Did it get dropped from the LiveCD?
For test3, we had to nuke /usr/share/docs so we'd fit on the CD which would have broken this. We've managed to make some other package tweaks to avoid having to do this in The Future (tm)
Jeremy
On Wed, 4 Apr 2007, Max Spevack wrote:
I just spent about 90 minutes going through Test3, starting with the Gnome LiveCD and working my way through installation, firstboot, and login. I tried to relive my days as a QA engineer and adopt the mindset of a user who isn't deeply technical, and as a user who becomes uncomfortable at anything that doesn't seem to "just work" the way it's expected to.
I have a number of suggestions and straight bugs. I don't have the time to open bugzillas for all of these.
I forgot to say, however, that overall the LiveCD is very impressive. But the difference between impressive and blows-you-away-awesome is the small stuff, and that is the spirit in which I wrote my email.
--Max
On Wed, 2007-04-04 at 11:46 -0400, Max Spevack wrote:
======================
Booting the LiveCD, grub gives you two options:
Fedora-7-Test3-Live-i386 Fedora-7-Test3-Live-i386 from RAM
This is confusing -- should I choose default or no? What's the difference between the two? I think users will be confused.
The FC6 live cd said "(run from RAM - requires 1GB+)" instead of "from RAM" which may be less confusing to at least English speaking users..
======================
The default user name at the Live CD's gdm -- this is a simple change
s/Fedora live CD/Fedora/
then if it's a LiveUSB or LiveDVD, the user name doesn't look odd
Sounds good to me...
======================
First impressions of the LiveCD desktop
Note that mostly all of your comments below also apply to the default desktop install.. best is to just fix the problems there. So I'm adding fedora-desktop-list to get out the desktop people to read this. For reference, the original mail was here
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-livecd-list/2007-April/msg00036.html
I basically agree with most of your points; some specific comments below...
We want it to be uncluttered, and to show off the coolest stuff in the most obvious way. To that end:
- do we need the SCIM module in the top right?
It would be nice if SCIM didn't show an icon for certain locales that use latin1, e.g. English, Danish, German, Dutch etc. So this should be fixed in SCIM itself... we shouldn't do a quick one-off for the live CD; we need to fix SCIM and keep including it by default...
Keep in mind that the live CD may be used by people who don't speak/read/understand a word of English.
- do we need the Desktop search module in the top right?
No, it should go IMO. Not Live CD specific.
What about the default applications at the top of the GNOME panel?
- now: evolution, web browser
Not Live CD specific. Agree it needs work... personally I think the web browser icon is butt ugly; it should show Firefox as that's the default browse... btw, it's even worse; a default desktop install we show icons for three OO applications. Do we really think that OO.o is the first thing people do?
(I mean, this setup might be fine for "RHEL Desktop" but I'd wager any day of the week, and twice on Sundays, that it isn't true for Fedora)
- "Other->Theme Installer" doesn't do anything, and should be removed
Fixed already in Rawhide AFAIK.
You missed my favorite pet peeve about the default desktop install. We show two trash cans, one in lower panel and one on the desktop. Do we _really_ want people to call us the trash distro? :-)
David
On Wed, 2007-04-04 at 12:47 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
On Wed, 2007-04-04 at 11:46 -0400, Max Spevack wrote:
======================
Booting the LiveCD, grub gives you two options:
Fedora-7-Test3-Live-i386 Fedora-7-Test3-Live-i386 from RAM
This is confusing -- should I choose default or no? What's the difference between the two? I think users will be confused.
The FC6 live cd said "(run from RAM - requires 1GB+)" instead of "from RAM" which may be less confusing to at least English speaking users..
At the same time, it's long and if you have a long enough fslabel (which we likely do), then you run out of space and only get part of the text displayed.
While the run from RAM option is nice, I'm still not entirely sold on it for the reasons Max was confused.
======================
The default user name at the Live CD's gdm -- this is a simple change
s/Fedora live CD/Fedora/
then if it's a LiveUSB or LiveDVD, the user name doesn't look odd
Sounds good to me...
I actually have pending changing it to "Fedora Live" instead of just Fedora. And actually changing the rest of the "livecd" type references to be just live or live image.
Jeremy
On Wed, 4 Apr 2007, Jeremy Katz wrote:
The default user name at the Live CD's gdm -- this is a simple change
s/Fedora live CD/Fedora/
then if it's a LiveUSB or LiveDVD, the user name doesn't look odd
Sounds good to me...
I actually have pending changing it to "Fedora Live" instead of just Fedora. And actually changing the rest of the "livecd" type references to be just live or live image.
works4me
--Max
livecd@lists.fedoraproject.org