I like the Slackware installer; I find it comforting and very similar to sysinstall in FreeBSD. Our ncurses installer does the job for me.
As I understand it if Slackware ever has a graphical installer that is one of the signs of the apocalypse.

Interesting this should come up. I've just been on the phone to my brother. Bear in mind, that in the past he's programmed, built systems, been to university etc.

He needed to install "Any Linux" onto some systems he had cobbled together. He can easily handle the installation, configuration, putting them together, giving them to people, training those people on them etc. and any user-support queries which come up but he had to install some distro on them first.

He downloaded Knoppix (mainly to test operation)
He downloaded Ubuntu
He downloaded a few other ISO's of smaller distros.

A few hours later, he comes online to tell me he can't get any of them working. After lengthy diagnosis (suspecting everything from crap BIOS's, to dodgy CD-writers, to ancient CD-readers, to graphics cards problems, to bad RAM, to faulty mainboards etc., none of which were the cause), we narrowed it down to some horrible bugs in graphical installers on even some quite modern hardware. Basically, they just aren't as reliable. We were getting everything from "Buffer I/O" errors (which if you google for them on Ubuntu could be anything from too much RAM, to too little, to crap BIOS etc. but good luck finding out why your PC gets them) to just hanging and rebooting. Even the supposed "safe-mode" installs crapped out most of the time.

Yet, we know that the Ubuntu distribution could be made to work once it was installed because I've used pre-installed disks too, but by then we'd changed just about every component in three computers at least twice.

So tomorrow, I'm going round there with a Slacky CD and sorting it out once and for all. I've never met a PC I couldn't install Slack on with it's "assume-nothing" installation interface.

You install once, maybe twice in your PC's life, unless you're doing lots of testing (which I have done for server installations etc.). The pretty window doesn't help that process if it causes 0.01% extra problems and in reality, they seem to add MUCH more problems than that. Additionally, while installing I'm ALWAYS doing stuff on a machine... as Slack installs, I'm usually found in another VT putting in my custom scripts, extra utilities, adding network settings, checking the machine configuration and (once it's past a certain stage of the installation) compiling a new kernel within a chroot.

The simple fact is GUI's provide no extra utility over text-mode. Slack's text-mode interface can do anything that a GUI interface could do (even graphical partitioning etc.) if it really wanted. I've often campaigned for offices, schools, etc. to go back to the old text-based interfaces... Press 1 to view a students details, etc. They are faster, simpler, more obvious, less resource-hungry, less liable to compromise (because how do you go about compromising a "press 1 - 9" menu?), etc.

What do you need to see in graphical representation when you install? Possibly partitions. That's about it. You could do that in a ncurses-interface if you really wanted to, but the fact is that you do it once and want to do it REALLY carefully anyway.

Even Windows XP's install tool starts, like all Windows installs before it, as a text-mode interface. It's just that they then switch to graphical part-way through so they can advertise at you.

Default installer is graphical. Sure, it uses text mode, but there won't be much difference between current version and (say) GTK or Qt based one. Except for the higher system requirements.

Yes, I forgot, actually curses is graphical. In the wiki it says curses is "GUI-like", isn't that good enough for ya ? It's way less buggy than any GUI app, and you don't need Xorg to run it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ncurses

I bet you've never even tried installing Slackware to see what it's like.

Goblin already answered - he may not have "Slackware Contributor" on his profile info, but it wouldn't be incorrect if it were there.

What's the reason for having a graphical installer?
Every human is lazy. So if no reason is presented, nothing will be done.

While my story doesn't include something as bad as Buffer I/O errors, this is the reason why I say boo to GUI installers.

When my friend was installing Kubuntu on his laptop, he did the LiveCD and went through the "really" graphical installer. He spent a lot of time on the partitioning portion and asked a lot of questions about the filesystems and mount points, etc. I looked at his partitioning settings and he should have had swap, /, and /home partitions. There was no way it was done incorrectly.

After he got running and starting moving his files off my laptop back to his (while using it and "discovering the adept tool"), his / partition ran out of space.

The GUI installer created the partitions and filesystems correctly, but did not create a mount point for the largest partition designated for /home. So all of the user settings were already set up in /home which was not on the big partition. Rather than play around with moving it, he just added a /home/store mount for all his stuff.

The last time I saw this, I screwed up the text installer for Slack.

KISS

GUI installer?
Why screw-up something that works perfect?

What they said.

I can't think of a single thing about a more "graphical" installer that would improve on the present installer - which works beautifully.

Animated pipe-smoking penguins? Cartoon messages that ask me whether I'm "sure" I want to do something? No thanks!

Is there *any* advantage / reason for using a GUI installer? I sure can't think of one...

I'd definitely not say that. It rather looks to hard-core for most people I know that are confronted with such types of interfaces.

Absolutely. And someone installing slack because he knows he will get what he wants by doing so will appreciate that. Without a proper admin, it probably wouldn't be the right choice for almost everyone else, so I don't see why everyone else shouldn't be frightened enough by the installer to stop what they are doing
But seriously, I am quite sure there will be some point of time where all OS installers will be graphical. I mean, look at technological devices developed today - imagine your DVD player or mobile phone to require you to enter some kind of typed in commands to start working. (And no, I'm not speaking of entering your PIN )
So: I don't think it's really necessary to call it apocalyptic if slackware once has a graphical installer. In that case, we should rather be happy that slack is still alive, I guess - because it's gonna be some time away, but as I said before, I should really be surprised if not all installers would go graphical in our lifetime. If the installer concept persists for so long...

This is just so true. The problem here is mainly the boot manager I suspect, so I'd already be happy if there was an option to "Install automatically except boot manager configuration" or maybe some option to choose those options initially and not finally. It shouldn't be too much of a problem to keep those rembered during the install.

PS: This may very well have been my longest post so far. Someone thank me please

You would have to ask Pat and his first circle of developers. Only they would know.

I don't think a non ncurses installer is necessary --- but the setup scripts are overdue for some love and attention.

I hope Pat considers the way the Zenwalkers added a graphic backdrop to create the illusion of a "graphical" installer. Slick and professional looking too. Another nice twist added by those folks is integrating cfdisk directly into the initial setup menu options. Again, nice and professional looking.

I would like to see better support for selecting partitions. Currently there is no backstep to correct typo errors after selecting target partitions. I'd like to see smooth support for installing from an ISO image. I'd like to see some "intelligence" when restarting the setup scripts such as looking for and reading an existing fstab to pre-populate target partitions. I'd like to see the services script improved. Netconfig overwrites existing config files and makes no backups. I'd like to see grub added as a boot loader option. I'd like to see some improved newbie friendliness such as helping the user automatically configure for a GUI (runlevel 4) boot. Mind you, these are improvement suggestions, not an argument for an X-based graphical installer.

All of these wishes are small but I think doable for the next dot-oh release. And yes, I'm willing to help when the time arrives.

Right now, let Pat and the gang enjoy a few beers and let them have time off to kick the kids and kiss the dogs. 12.2 is hot off the presses --- wait about a month and then this type of discussion will carry more weight.

Oh what the hell --- okay!

What he says.

Honest question to the OP:

Do you feel there something that a GUI installer would provide, that you think is missing from the current ncurses installer?

When I first changed to Slackware, I missed the graphical disc partitioning tools I had become accustomed to in Suse's Yast installer. I eventually learned how to do it in Slackware, but I remember considering it part of the learning curve I wished I could have put off until after I installed Slackware successfully once.

I don't feel that way now and I would argue against a GUI installer like most folks here, but I was interested in your perspective.

While I agree that this option should be made easier to find, I don't think that it should be put in the installer. The reason is that the installer neither configures X, nor installs the proprietary drivers (e.g. ATI and NVIDIA) needed by many desktops. Therefore, setting the run level to 4 right after installation will result in a suboptimal system at best, and an unusable one at worst.