How can we improve our installation experience?

@mhorn is the owner from the installer

I installed Clear Linux today on my N3700 NUC and the installation went quite smooth (I would have liked some more feedback, that the install process is still alive, during the prodecure). I was able to set up my golang environment without problems, the go gtk bindings installed fine from github. Firefox works nicely for me (and I found the forum post for the ffmpeg firefox solution soon). On my low power (6W TDP) box my first impression is very good. Keep up your good work with Clear Linux.

2 Likes

If you have free space on a disk that already has a swap partition, it will get reused by Clear Linux.
But, Clear Linux OS only boot using the clr-boot-manager so we currently have hard requirement of creating a /boot partition with the EFI for Clear Linux. To my knowledge, this is a requirement to have /boot, formatted as VFAT, containing Clear Linux boot.

Not exactly. As far as I remember, after installing Clear Linux on Unallocated space on my hard disk along with the other Linux distribution, I see that there are two additional partitions created one for swap (around 250 MB) and one for ESP (around 150 MB).

I am not sure if this changed with the latest installer. :wink:

@mhorn is doable to reuse the ESP and swap.

The ESP is for standard a vFAT partition.

One problems is that clr-boot-manager requires the path be /boot, and that is not necessarily the case for all OS.
Also, the method for automatically identifying the partition is problematic.
This might get enabled when we forward port the Advanced Media configuration from Text-based to the Graphical installer.

I just installed using the graphical installer and thought the computer locked up. There needs to be some sort of continuous progress report as to what is going on. I was thinking there needs to be a terminal report out at the bottom of the installer that can either be opened up or closed. Somehow the end users has to have a sense of what is going on. UEFI doesn’t work properly after the install.

2 Likes

After I booted into Clear with the Budgie USB Clear booted by itself the 2nd time, so I don’t know what happened there. Does Clear upgrade itself to the latest version during the install? How do you know what version you are running? Also is there a menu system that can be installed?

Perhaps maybe a verbose output for the GUI installer?
It’s been on “Installing base OS and configured bundles” for a few hours, I’d like to know if it’s doing something, or has it hung?

I understand that you can’t legally ship codecs, could you perhaps include a build script in a post installer?

1 Like

Hi. Trying to install to a USB stick. Have live install on one stick. Booted to live cd. Cannot see any other USB device. In fact it only recognized one, primary USB device and my main ssd.
Checked the devices in Windows and all ok.
Is this a driver issue is specific to my Lenovo laptop.

Would really like to get to know this OS.

Stuart

Please include NVIDIA drivers into the media iso!

2 Likes

It would also be nice to include ffmpeg for H264 support out of the box.

We can’t.

Same here. If we could, we would have.

what about brave-browser,chromium,google-chrome?

The installation steps for Brave and Chrome are here

1 Like

I have installed,my ideea is about official CL package

Any progress with the expected changes in the installer to be able to install Clear Linux to one selected target partition?

Installing to a Lenovo ThinkPad X240 with the clear-29800-live-desktop.iso on USB 3.0 drive:

  1. Keyboard navigation is problematic in the installer. No “Alt-(pause few seconds)” to see accelerators for “Next” button, etc… Pressing “Tab” or “Enter” does not always do what is expected and in some cases, closes the installer completely(Selects “Exit” when the “Next” button appears to be highlighted).

  2. My install wont complete and crashes, repeatedly, at the “Cleaning up download directory…”. I can’t find an installer log in the usual “/var/logs” dir to investigate the crash. Is there an installer log and where is it? The one in /root/clr-installer.log doesn’t contain any failure info.

  3. I just got passed the crash in #2 by launching the installer from a terminal with “pkexec /usr/bin/clr-installer-gui”. This also shows me the stages, on the terminal, as I was hoping to capture some debugging for ya. But the installer is working now, launched in this fashion(!?!?).

  4. OOOOppp’s … just crashed again. Here are the errors: clr-installer-gui-29800 crash - Pastebin.com

  5. Just opened a bug @ clr-installer-gui(29800) crash with output to terminal · Issue #435 · clearlinux/clr-installer · GitHub

A big thanks to everyone for these incredible inputs.
Just a heads up. Some of the issues you are having are already being addressed. We are also working on some other future improvements based on the feedback we are receiving in this thread.

1 Like

Early feedback on a ongoing installation:

  1. XPS13 9343, wifi (b43) not detected: maybe some opensource driver may go?
  2. install fails without connection: please add a retry button, I can ad a cable but I’d avoid redoing the first pages of the widzard
  3. setup progress: setup ended silently with no feedback, was it OK or Fail?
  4. default encrypted setup has no encryption for the swapfile :no_good_woman:
  5. setup failed silently, unable to boot :frowning_face:

Sorry, no luck, I’ll try again the next time.