Earlier today we posted about InitalExperience that will make configuring a breeze for new Fedora users. Now it seems that the Fedora team is also busy with giving a new look to their installer, Anaconda.

According to this wiki page, Anaconda that was left untouched for many years will get a new redefined look soon. This newly designed installer is scheduled to release with Fedora 18 codenamed Spherical Cow and 50% of work of it is already done.

The move cames  in accordance with the fact that  no work was done on Anaconda installer for years and there was no cohesive design all together. On some screens, such as the partitioning one, there is too much fuss while other screens, such as those providing a root password, are bare.

To overcome this problem and also to get rid of the small bugs that have crept in due to hand-written code, the new UI is a complete redesign that will offer an interface known as 'hub and spoke model'. In this model, the user will get a limited number of screens where they will fill out information like languages etc and then put in the first hub, where they can configure things according to their liking. Then they will move to the second stage of install where their preferences will be implemented. Also, a lot of tasks, such as repository metadata downloading, will take place in the background to speed up installation.

To save time and manpower, there will be no text UI for installation.The  main goal of this redesign is to make the installation faster as a user do not need to go through every page. Also some long tasks will go in background thus speeding things up. The hub and spoke model will also reduce the complexity of adding new pages and make it easier for re-builders to customize the installation.

From the whiteboard here, we can say that this redesign is highly inspired from openSuse.

Fedora 18 is scheduled to be released later this year and has got quite a good number of changes from its earlier versions.