On Wed, 9 Jul 2003 08:17:12 +0200, David Neary <dneary@xxxxxxx> wrote: > Alan Horkan wrote: > > I think the user installer could be shortened or even removed entirely. > > Distributions like Knoppix already skip it entirely. [...] > I agree for the most part. We don't really need to tell the user > that the mkdir of .gimp-1.3/patterns succeeded. At the very least > we could hide this kind of thing behind a "More info" button. I agree. [...] > And, IMHO, the GIMP performance tuning page should be left out. > These things are parametrisable in the preferences, and they > should probably be better documented in a "Troubleshooting" > section under performance problems and disk space problems. This is something that I disagree with, for two reasons: - The user should pay attention to that. This is probably the most important part of the user installation. The default settings are unfortunately wrong in many cases, so it is a good idea to draw the user's attention on these settings. - No matter what default value is used (64 MB, 128 MB or more), this default will be wrong for almost half of the users. But the user installation step is a good place to add some code that could at least attempt to improve the default value presented to the user. Some time ago, I proposed to add a call to a script that would try to guess the appropriate size for the tile cache by running some commands such as "free" or looking into /proc/meminfo if it exists. If the script finds any way to get the amount of free memory, it would multiply it by 0.8 (for example), round to the nearest multiple of 10 MB (for example) and show that as the default value that the user can edit. This will not work in every case, but then the script can fall back to the initial default if it cannot find any way to estimate the amount of free memory. This is not a perfect solution and it will not work on all systems (some of these optional tests may be Linux-specific), but anything that is adapted to some extent to the amount of memory available on the machine is better than a static default. The value proposed to the user may not be 100% correct and will depend on the applications running at the time of the user installation, but at least it would have a better chance of being close to what the user wants than proposing 64 MB on a machine that has 4 GB of RAM (or proposing 128 MB on a machine that has only 64 MB of RAM). > And page 5 (monitor calibration) should definitely be skipped. Get > the resolution my default from the monitor, as we do, and allow > manual calibration in the preferences. Yes, why not. This setting is usually less critical, especially for those who create images for the web and do not have to worry about converting pixels to other units. I guess that the majority of the GIMP users do not care about that setting (even if I do). > So there are 5 installation pages to go through, of which someone > unfamiliar with the GIMP, or somewhat familiar with the GIMP, but > not with computing in general, might be interested in 1, or even > 0. > > I think it can be simplified a lot too. Me too! (tm) ;-) -Raphaël
