Anaconda’s Errors, Part Two
Back on Wednesday, I posted about potential screen designs for Anaconda’s error screens. I’ve cleaned up what I showed you and I’ve gotten more of them fleshed out.
If Anaconda can’t verify or deny the integrity of your install media, it could look somewhat like this:
What do you think?
Here’s what the network connection failure screen I showed you last time has been updated to look like (note, this is for wireless users doing a net-install, text is slightly different if either of those cases is not true):
There’s less empty space between the buttons & on the buttons, the icon has changed from a generic error icon to a network connection icon with a little X. As requested, the user is now also informed that tty2 is available for troubleshooting. Some wording has changed.
Then there’s this design for unknown errors:
Obviously we’d be hoping this screen never came up for anyone, but realistically software does have problems, and it’s better to have a nice screen for it than no screen. So if you have any ideas for this one, especially what kind of options the user might benefit from having, post a comment! Feedback is always appreciated.
There are five basic screens, as far as I can tell, that Anaconda will need. There’s the network connection failure screen, the kickstart-prefill repository issue screen, the media verification screen, the unknown error screen, and the insufficient RAM screen. There are some necessary variations for some of the screens, but if I pin down one case of each of those screens, the rest is just fine-tuning, a sentence here or there. Two of these were in my previous post, this post revisits one of them and displays two more, and there’s one screen you haven’t seen: Insufficient RAM.
This screen’s gone through so many rough drafts. There are so many technical details that I don’t know, or didn’t know, and have had to account for. Currently, I believe the plan is to give the user a link to a page on the Fedora wiki that explains all the options someone with little RAM has. It would cover ways to install for users with enough RAM for Fedora, but not enough for Anaconda. It might cover potential solutions for people who don’t have enough RAM for Fedora – perhaps recommending similar distros with less taxing system requirements. The biggest obstacle to this is that there is no such page as far as I can tell. If you want to write a page, go ahead! I will probably end up writing a page, but it really isn’t my field of expertise and I don’t think I’d be able to write a comprehensive one.
Thanks for reading!
Might there be other circumstances in the install (beyond network failure) in which you’d want to allow the user either to back up and try a different option or to try again? If there’s the potential for unanticipated but theoretically recoverable errors, it might be useful to allow for the possibility of including Back and Retry buttons on the generic “unknown error” screen.
I don’t know. I’ll look into that and get back to you about it. Good idea!
Okay, I’ve been talking with those who code for it, and the way the unknown error screen works it wouldn’t be able to have a back or retry button, sorry. Thanks for the suggestion though, I wouldn’t have thought of that by myself.