The installer is two parts, on purpose. The window asks the questions, draws the disk and shows the progress; it never touches a disk itself. The engine looks at the machine, turns the answers into a plan, and carries the plan out; it is the only part that runs with the administrator’s rights.
The window builds the plan, shows what the plan does, and only then hands it over. So what you are shown before you agree is exactly what is done.
Where the system can go
- Erase: a new partition table, an EFI partition, the rest for etyOS.
- Alongside: into free room, or, when there is not enough, Windows’
partition is made smaller first (
ntfsresize, checked with--no-actionbefore anything is changed). The existing EFI partition is reused, Windows’ loader stays where it is, and GRUB gets a menu entry for it.
What it refuses
A plan is not run when:
- the disk holds the running system or anything mounted;
- the room is under 24 GiB;
- Windows would be left with under 20 GiB of headroom;
- Windows is BitLocker-encrypted and would have to be made smaller;
- the account is not usable.
The reason is shown next to the button that cannot be pressed.
Where the system comes from
On the installation medium, the system copied to the disk is the live image
itself (a squashfs), with the live parts taken out: the live user, its
autologin and passwordless sudo, the installer in the autostart, live-boot.
So the installation needs no network.
Drivers and Secure Boot
The installer looks at the hardware and offers what it asks for: the NVIDIA driver, Broadcom Wi-Fi, Intel and Realtek firmware.
With Secure Boot on, two things are done:
- The system starts through the signed loader (
shim-signed,grub-efi-amd64-signed). - A driver built on the machine (NVIDIA, Broadcom) is signed with the machine’s own key, which is queued for enrolment with the account’s password. On the next start the firmware shows a screen asking to accept it. The window says so before installing, not after.
How it talks to you
The installer is the first thing a person sees of etyOS, so it follows the design code more strictly, not less:
- One question per step; a rail on glass shows what is behind and ahead.
- The way on is the one primary button and says what it does (“Install”, not “Next”, on the step that installs). When it cannot be taken, a line next to it says why.
- A disk is never described in words alone: it is drawn to scale, as it is
and as it will be (
DiskMap), and the drawing moves while a slider divides it. - Words are a person’s (“Windows is made smaller”), never the tool’s.
- What cannot be undone is said once more in a sheet, with the destructive button named for what it destroys.
- While it works there is one ring with its parts ticked off, and never a wall of log. If it stops, it says which step, why, and what is still intact.
What has and has not been tried
Installing in a virtual machine has been. Installing on real hardware has not been tried on every kind of machine: keep a backup, and if something goes wrong, a report with the machine’s details is worth a lot. Legacy BIOS is handled only for an installation that takes the whole disk.