news
Review: The new Chimera Linux installer
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
My simple conclusion is that, ultimately, the Chimera Linux installer worked. My computer displayed a bootloader menu with Chimera listed and the newly installed distribution booted with no problems, presenting me with a console login screen. I could then sign in and use the operating system, fetch additional packages, and set up a desktop environment.
On the positive side of the experience, the system installer is quite fast. It is fairly easy to navigate, and it can be run from the desktop or from text-only environments. It doesn't have a lot of options, and what it does have worked. Chances are anyone who has installed any other Linux distribution using a text-based menu system will feel comfortable with Chimera's new installer.
There is some room for improvement, I think. It would be nice if the installer offered to handle partitioning for us, or as an alternative, it could offer to launch one of the partition managers. As mentioned above, it would be nice to have the system installer list popular extra packages it can install rather than have us type out package names. I'd especially like to see future versions of the installer offer to enable a desktop environment for us.
For now, this first draft of the installer is a good beginning. It worked and it is fast and it follows the approach used by similar installers, making it familiar to people accustomed to setting up Linux distributions in text environments. I hope the developers extend the installer a bit to offer some more conveniences.