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NetInstall usability

Posted: 2018/01/24 22:16:47
by acdha
Is anyone working to improve the usability of the installer? I recently went to create a quick test VM and the experience using the NetInstall process was unnecessarily tedious:
  1. The installer doesn't include a mirror list and the precise mirror URLs are undocumented.
  2. All errors are reported as a generic “A server with the specified hostname could not be found” message which actually covers any network error from not having a connection at all to an HTTP error code
  3. The network tab isn't reliably visible on the install screen without scrolling. This is a problem because the interface is disabled by default and must be manually enabled and there is no other UI indication that your network install failed because there's no active network interface.
  4. https://wiki.centos.org/Download suggests using a mirror but mirror.centos.org is more reliable (I tried several others & got the generic error a couple of times before they worked)
  5. https://www.centos.org/docs/ only goes up to version 5
I realize the general clunky UI in the installer is inherited from RHEL but it'd be really nice if, say, it at least defaulted to enabling the network interfaces by default and offering mirror.centos.org as a default choice similar to e.g. deb.debian.org.