Edit: Unfortunately, the images originally included in this post are gone, because of hosting problems in late 2009. My apologies.

I’m running through my first installation with the Hardy beta; until now, all of my Hardy systems were dist-upgrades (or should I say full-upgrades now? 😉 ). It looks like the alternate installation sequence — and the whole CD really, got a nice makeover.

The boot menu has the only change I don’t like now. I’ve tried the Hardy beta alternate CD on two different machines, and the first boot menu has an enormous menu that springs into your face — popup window style — asking for a language choice.

I’m all for choice, but you never even get to see the splash screen until that menu explodes into view. I feel confident in expecting that to change.

Once it’s out of the way you can see that the boot menu itself has changed — items are fewer, and are centered now.

If you’re only after this version for the minimal installation, you’ll be interested to see that the command-line installation option has been relegated to an “alternative modes” menu … as an alternate for the alternate? 😯

But aside from that, most of the installation process seems the same. I could mention that there are more options for Japanese keyboards now, but I imagine that would only interest the slim English-speaker-using-Japanese-keyboard-with-Ubuntu-beta sub-population. Oops, I just did that.

And I notice that the time is automatically synced over the Internet now, asking for UTC versus local time at the end. That’s a nice touch.

Otherwise, it’s business as usual for us alternate-CD fans. I still prefer this as an installation method, rather than the desktop CD. I like that one for flexibility and immediacy, but the alternate CD is still the one I actually burn to a disc.