F6 menu behaviour is confusing

Pressing F6 twice should give you the option. I've considered changing the behaviour of F6 so that it pops up its menu immediately rather than requiring two presses, which I concede is awkward.

I'd just like to say that I do not consider expert mode as something anyone should have to use unless explicitly advised to do so by an installer developer. Why did you find that you needed it?

Moving to gfxboot-theme-ubuntu, which governs this menu structure.

Huh! First time I've ever seen that F6*2 menu.

I use expert mode so that I can...

* select a 104-key PC keyboard model, instead of an international 105-key (I don't know why it defaults to the latter)

* enable login as root, and not create a normal user account (for a system that will have remotely-defined users, a la LDAP/Kerberos/AFS)

(I want to add "not enable automatic updates" and "enter a mirror hostname of my choice, as I use apt-cacher", but I can't remember offhand whether these options were absent from the normal install menus.)

In general, I want that full range of control allowed by a low debconf priority. It works very well in the Debian installer---isn't it reasonable for the Ubuntu alternate installer (not even the one that most people would use) to offer that as well?

On the more general point of a confusing F6*2 menu, I'd like to point out that the F4 ("Modes") menu is not all that unrelated, in that both address variations of the normal install process. Might it help to unify these two?

The F4 menu is a choice of one out of four options, whereas F6*2 is a set of six individually toggle-able options. A combined menu could make use of standard radio-button and check-box widgets to indicate the nature of each choice. (This would address a separate issue with the current menu implementation, that the "1 out of N" vs. "N out of N" nature of either menu is not clear.)

OK, I suppose that these are reasonable uses for expert mode. I just try to avoid cases of people using it unnecessarily, since we put very little effort into its UI.

On F4 vs. F6: what standard widgets? :-) This is all implemented in gfxboot, and no standard widgets are available - we have to draw and handle them all by hand. As such it maintained my sanity somewhat better to have them as two separate menus. This is a case where I'd certainly look at a patch somebody offered, but am unlikely to have time to do any more fancy widget design myself. I don't think we should unify the menus without having it more visually clear what's going on, as that would make it even more confusing.

For the time being, I expect to get rid of the confusing F6 F6 interface in jaunty, and have F6 pop up that menu immediately, since that's relatively straightforward. We'll see how that goes.

Well, "standard widgets" in the sense of following a common GUI idiom; the implementation's a whole 'nuther matter! Even now, there's the little X's that appear next to selected options in the F6*2 menu, so it would be an elaboration of that. (A unified menu, on the other hand, does seem a tad overambitious.)

But having the F6*2 menu come up with a single F6 keypress is a good move, IMHO. The menu is certainly going to be more useful than the kernel command line to most users.

(I'd furthermore posit that the command line hurts more than it helps in the majority of cases. The way that it doesn't change when you select different menu options, and yet /proc/cmdline does reflect the selected menu options, is very confusing. [E.g. selecting a command-line install doesn't visibly change the file= parameter to .../cli.seed.] Even if I needed to put in some obscure kernel parameter, I couldn't be exactly sure of how the command line will be interpreted if the kernel gets passed something different from what I see in the boot screen.)

This bug was fixed in the package gfxboot-theme-ubuntu - 0.7.0

---------------
gfxboot-theme-ubuntu (0.7.0) jaunty; urgency=low

  * Pop up "Other options" menu after pressing F6 just once, rather than
    requiring two presses (LP: #294840).

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:13:22 +0000