Re: newbies needing help for graphic login

Richard Lyons wrote:

The increasing frequency of 'help help help' messages from new users who
arrive at a command line console and don't know what to do next is a
good sign: more people moving from doze to Linux, more moving from
fedora and suze to debian.  But there is a real danger of scaring them
off -- and I think their plight is a sign that debian should offer a
little extra help for them.  What do others here think?

What I have in mind is that the new installer could rewrite the welcome
text to say something like 

    This is a new install of
    Debian GNU/Linux stable thisbox tty1

If you expected to get a graphic logon and desktop, please login as root and run "makemegraphic"

    Otherwise, run "installdone" to get rid of this message.

    thisbox login: _

With, obviously, a couple of scripts to either revert to the normal
situation or install kde and kdm (easiest, IMHO, for beginners -- but
gnome and gdm would do too, or perhaps the two alternatives could be
offered by the script, with a brief description of pros and cons).

I'm guessing this would be a trivial exercise, but I think it would make
for a much sweeter experience for many of the growing numbers of Debian
newbies.

Improvements? Disagreement? Consensus?

This is a very interesting approach, but I am afraid it is even more confusing to the new users. Also, this (booting into X by default) should be done (and is done?) by default if the user chooses Desktop during install. There was a discussion about this in debian-devel some time ago, and the proposed solution was something like asking a user to choose from "KDE Desktop" and "GNOME Desktop" during install. Not sure what the conclusion was (or was there none?), but this problem will be solved in the next Debian release one way or another.

On the other hand, what you propose could be implemented as a fallback in case a user manages to misconfigure something and X fails to start (this is already done by at least GDM by some degree). If you are familiar with what is going on in development of the latest Debian Installer and feel that your way is somewhat better, I suggest you post your ideas to debian-devel.


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