Just tried the latest Refracta and did a "real" HD install. I'm pleased to see xterm included, refracta stuff "debianized" and I like the layout of the new installer. Everything is fine now but there were a few problems, and observations:
INSTALLER
In the zenity dialogs, ticks in the boxes don't show, instead the box just goes a slightly darker grey and shifts slightly to the left. Not easy to see, however it works.
Problem with editing sudoers (might have had something to do with not changing the keyboard) Nano opened and I could not navigate it normally, could not even get out with CTRL+x Fortunately desperate random keystrokes closed it and the installer continued. Never mind, I know how to do that manually. Why not just disable sudo in the installed system automatically? "Ubuntu-style" sudo is quite un-Debian anyway, unless you really want that...
I didn't notice a dialog to set new passwords and had to do that post-install. Maybe my error.
I configured the installer to not do bootloader. I use grub-legacy and don't want my carefully-customised menus and MBR trashed. No problem there, I can sort that myself. However I noticed, unfortunately for me, that the new installer depends on grub-pc. I seem to remember before, it did not, and would work for a snapshot with grub-legacy.
As the commands <update-grub> and <grub-install> are the same, the dependency could be "grub-pc|grub-legacy"
OTHER
I noticed that live-config and live-config-sysvinit are not installed. They are important packages used to recreate (some) "live" systems/snapshots. Also /usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/live (a component of live-boot-initramfs-tools) is missing. Any reason for this?
If the initrd is updated for whatever reason it seems almost certain that a snapshot (or a "live" image made by other means) from won't boot because /scripts/live will not be there. Unless live-boot-initramfs-tools (possibly live-boot also) is reinstalled before <update-initramfs -u> is run. I haven't actually tested this yet or tried to do a snapshot. See this debianuserforums thread for more info:
http://www.debianuserforums.org/viewtop ... f=7&t=1288