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Interview with Adam Di Carlo (Debian Boot)
robstah writes: "The installer is the heart of any Operating System, Debian is no different. The mature but ageing boot-floppies installer will rear its head for the last time in woody. In this interview with Adam Di Carlo, one of the lead developers of this system we investigate the past, present and future of the Debian installation system ready for the upcoming release of woody: The next generation of Debian."
are cool. don't kill them.
--jon
Cleanstick.org: Dumb weblog about nothing
i've always used them to install debian (except when i didn't have a working floppy drive) and i always choose the network install for both the base system and packages. it's so much easier than the cd. you can always get the latest packages and not have to worry about upgrading right away. the only thing i didn't like was the addition of another driver disk with one of the last releases of potato. i got over it though.
please me, have no regrets.
Although it's a necessary component, it's a stretch to call it the heart.
What I'd like to see is more install source options... perhaps the capability to mount Windows shares via smbmount to access the CDROM.
The Spleen of the Distro!
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
The Debian installer IMHO, is very elegant, smooth, and has a near perfect balance of functionality for power users and entry level users alike. Power users generally get the flexability they need, and entry level users only need to contribute a little bit more thought than say, RedHat's installer. I say, KISS, and hang onto this installer for a little while longer. The only real problem I've ever seen with Debian's installer was the dselect stage, where most users choke completely. That however, has become an option and users may now run the simple and straight foward tasksel util. If the Debian people are going to try and replace this installer, I certainly hope they keep the existing paradigms around for those of us who love Debian as it is (it's the only perfect distro in my book).
On the other hand, what Debian really needs to do is enhance and extend the aforementions tasksel utility. Tasksel has the right idea, but it doesn't go far enough. It's not very extensive and it'd be nice to break things down into smaller groups without having to jump all the way over to dselect. For example, from tasksel, installing the TeX packages is clear, but maybe I want all the immediately necessary LaTeX components and not all the utilities that convert TeX to every other format imaginable for documents. But make this a hierarchial option that's hidden in tree form under this task. That'll give us more middle ground between tasksel and dselect.
Why bother.
..the birth canal of a distribution
otherwise known as...
ahem...
ah... lets not go there...
More like the breasts... it's hard to get started in life without access to some.
Wah!
Anyone who has tried to install Solaris 8 on Intel will cry tears of joy by seeing any Debian installer ANY time.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
What makes the difference in a distro is the set of policies and procedures that make the distro something recognizable. If those are comprehensive, enforced, and automated enough, it becomes possible to trust the distro from release to release.
The infrastructure of the Debian distro has flowered as the "apt-get" tool and its related GUI applications (gnome-apt, aptitude, deity). Apt-get makes a Debian system far easier to maintain, and keep up to date and secure, than any other. Debian policies and package tools make it possible to use safely. Apt-get without all the infrastructure beneath would be too dangerous to trust.
For more detail on the topic, see the Advogato posting.
If you've ever tried downloading a Debian .iso and install off if you'll find that they intentionally do not provice .iso images to save on bandwidth. However, making 12-16 floppies with all the possible drivers on it was something I was -not- going to do.
.iso that had nothing but the boot * root floppies, base2_2.tgz, and drivers.tgz, burned it to disk and viola. All I needed now was my CD, two floppy disks and I could do a 'net install just fine. If I ever got adventurous I'd have actually made the CD bootable and put the root FS on it but quite frankly It's only once every month or so that I have to do an install so finding the floppies isn't a big deal.
.iso image for download, burn to disc, and have all the tools to do a 'net install off of it? Made my life pretty simple; wouldn't take more than a day to smash together I'd imagine either.
For my first 2.2. installation I put the drivers.tgs and the base2_2.tgz on my existing windows partition then just used the boot/root disks to do the install. This was nice; and I did something similar on two machines which were shipped to me w/ a RedHat installation on them.
But... what do you do when you don't have an existing OS on there? After some thinking I put together my own
How 'bout it Debian team... a ~20MB
Justin Buist
Great work and all that, we really appreciate what you've done. Now, I'd really like to know which boot you put on first thing in the morning, is the right foot or the left foot? Have you ever put your boots on the wrong feet before?
Thanks!.
P.S.: What do you think of RedBoot (It's for embedded devices)?
M0571y H@rml355.
Installers that work by using a boot floppy to access a network image of the install are still one of the best ways to install systems in a large environment:
1) You don't have to configure the machine to boot from CD, then remember to turn that back off in the BIOS when you are done.
2) HTTP or NFS access across a 10Base-T is about equal to a 10 spin CD-ROM - across a 100Base-t its faster than all but the most top of the line DVDROM drives.
3) Start one install, as soon as the machine boots remove floppy, insert into next machine, and repeat.
Don't get me wrong - I like CD installs for single machine environments. But I ALWAYS have the latest copy of RedHat exported from my server in the basement - makes it a lot easier when rolling a firewall/scratch machine/whatever.
www.eFax.com are spammers
More like the breasts... it's hard to get started in life without access to some.
And then, once started in life, you never need/want to see them again.
Dinivin
I quite like the Debian installer as well, however it suffers from the same problem that all Linux installers seem to - it doesn't consistently get X configuration right. For a server that's not a problem, for a desktop machine it is. Support for graphics cards, monitors, input devices etc in XFree86 seems to be pretty good now, but configuring it is still a nightmare. Installers (or better X) need to automatically detect the settings required and just work.
In fact, that's probably the biggest reason Linux isn't ready for the desktop. Once you get a system set up and configured right, it's fairly easy to use, particularly with KDE and GNOME these days, but if you can't get your system to that point then it's all for naught. Remember that not everyone has a local geek and Linux pretty much never comes preinstalled.
The installer is the heart of any operating system? Ummm... ok. I wasn't completely sure about that kernel thing... glad you clarified it for me. Thanks.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Debian isn't a 586+ distro. Even most early pentiums couldn't boot off CDROM.
Yes, go to the Gdkxft site and download/install the 1.4 tarball. Then:
$ LD_PRELOAD=libgdkxft.so mozilla
Enjoy a jaggy-less web experience!
-adnans
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
why is that funny? the person arguing for the belly button sounds extrememly effeminate, i would expect a vagina there, and theres enough desperate guys here on slashdot for anything with one, human or otherwise, to require birth control
by the way, you slashdot editors are the assholes of the distro, for banning my subnet again. but that doesn't stop me from posting!
In the latest Linux journal copy I received, Debian has been elected the less usable Linux distro. Wanna why? Well, just try to install stable on some less than 1 year old hw or unstable (woody) instead. Use their mailing list to ask for help, because the installation is all fscked up. The next thing you want to do after reading the answers you get are getting is ordering your copy of SuSe
*.sid? As in the format for ripped C-64 music? Rock on! With 20GB, you could fit every commodore 64 song ever written on the thing.
F0 07 C7 C8
(looks quizically at the article title)
I blame mozilla!
F0 07 C7 C8
From my vast experience with this distro, on a high-bandwidth connection this is the easiest way to do an install.
:-D )
1. Download and write to floppy the image-1.44/compact disks (rescue, root, and driver-1).
2. Boot with Rescue in.
3. Follow the directions.
DHCP makes this a blast and you're into Dselect (or tasksel if you want) within fifteen minutes at most. You end up download much less than an entire ISO in most cases, and it's better because you're always going to get the latest packages.
If you have to do an install on multiple machines, download the entire tree for your distro onto one machine, and set it up as a server with FTP or somesuch so that APT can access that local machine as a repository. Over 100baseTX, it takes no time at all to do an install (after all, a fast hard drive over ethernet is probably faster than your cdrom drive is anyways
There are also ReiserFS boot disks available now that will let you get up and running with a great journalling filesystem from scratch, with the selection of one simple option.
I found the Debian installer much easier to use than Red Hat's, and much more powerful than Mandrake's.
Give it a try! You won't go back!
I've been an assistant at a half dozen installfests: a couple where mostly Red Hat got installed, a couple with mostly Mandrake, and a couple with mostly Debian. Unless Debian's installer has improved by orders of magnitude in the last 9-10 months, it is by far the most newbie-unfriendly of the lot. Even people experienced with other distributions needed to be walked through a Debian installation process beforehand to try and prevent any unpleasant surprises.
Debian is a wonderful distribution (even for new users, now) once you've got it running, but if you think any "entry level users" can sit down at a Debian installation and have the slightest hope of getting through it successfully, you're deluding yourself.
It's also the first thing you notice when you're checking out a new distro, and it's the only thing at all that shallow reviewers pay any attention to.
buy Win XP, insert the CD, leave the computer for a couple of minutes, go back, everything is all set =)
The GNU/Compiler is.
-Richard Stallman, countless times
Yes, but only for FreeBSD and NetBSD.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
- Go to display properties for each user and turn off that god-awful Luna interface.
- Hand-edit c:\winnt\inf\sysoc.inf and remove "hide" from all the components so that you can actually remove the ones you don't need.
- Go to the Add/Remove Programs control panel to remove Windows Messenger, Media Player and all the other
.NET crap that you don't have any choice of not installing in the first place.
Yeah, other than that XP's pretty easy to get going![Some (hopefully) constructive criticism incoming.]
Dselect has maybe the most horrible, messy and counterintuitive user interface I've ever seen.
Sure, it probably has some ubercool highly generic logic if you use hours learning to understand it, but that's not quite what a person installing an operating system should be expected to do.
Really, when I first *tried* to install Debian, I had 18 years of experience with computers, 5 years with (Redhat) Linux, and I got totally lost with the Debian installation.
For example, why can't the "go-back-to-previous-menu-key" be like it is in 100% of modern software? Why does it have to be Shift+Q? Why do I have to read some help to find this out? Why am I required to read ONE SCREEN full of help text when I start selecting packages?
When I'm installing an operating system, I *don't* want to spend one second of brain time trying to learn something totally unnecessary.
Just follow the user interfaces of Redhat, Mandrake or SuSE, they are rather good, although still have quite many problems too (I reported roughly 10 problems with last Mandrake installation). I think Corel Linux had the best and easiest installation I've seen.
Also messing up with the APT sources list isn't too easy. It really should have some meta servers. Corel Linux had some nice manager which does that, I think.
One very good thing which I like, is that Debian saves a journal of the installation to the disk, and thus remembers the selections you've done. This is very important if the installation fails/crashes for some reason at some point. All the Redhat-based distros are missing this very important feature.
The apt-get seems to be generally much better than the RPM counterparts, although I've had some problems with apt-get too, usually with dependencies in the unstable release. Even one database corruption, but luckily it's text-based so it was easyish to fix. (When my RPM database corrupted under Redhat, the only option was to reinstall the entire distro.)
And please make the CD bootable. The previous potato distro didn't have a bootable CD (or at least it didn't boot in my machine), and I don't have a floppy drive, so I had to fight with it for three days to get it installed from my old Redhat partition (I had to mount the floppy image as loop-back, chroot it, etc).
You may have a point there.. After all, the nipple is the only real intuitive interface :-)
:)
Actually, I can think of one other, but I'll keep slashdot clean
karma capped
Buy an iMac.
Plug it in
Turn on the power
Everything is all set!
A lot of debian users are very comfortable with debian's installer as it is. Most debian users I know, install just the basic OS, then use dselect to install the packages of their liking. Very minimal and effective. Will this option still be around for us experienced users?
As for me, I won't use Debian because the adsl package is fucked beyond belief.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
1. Download and write to floppy the image-1.44/compact disks (rescue, root, and driver-1).
You forgot 0. Buy a floppy drive. Many computers I encounter have broken floppy drives that damage disks.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I just got the Debian woody (2.2r4) i386 set of binaries from CheapBytes. Maybe someday when xDSL becomes less of a pain in the ass, I can have all the current packages.
I was disappointed that the binaries came with XFree86 3.x Why? Can somebody point me to a CD vendor with the latest (latest as in today) images?
We got some
In other words, we'll see a graphical Debian installer around 2010 or so?
My first linux was debian, i just sat down and did it. YMMV, i guess
The coffee god lives!
When i first tried debian i also had great problems with dselect, it does have a steep learning curve. If you cant remember all the keys, its slows you down greatly to constatly refer to the help screen.
Once you get to know it its really good, there are probably 4 or 5 alternative GUI's about, but i still use dselect 90% of the time, sometimes even over apt-get (more info).
Debian is a distribution you install only once, so having a graphical wizard (in both senses for Mandrake) doesn't really matter.
And anyway, the installer is great.
# make install
I spent 1/2 an hour fiddling with the Debian pppoe package, and concluded it was a much better idea to punt over to David Skoll's original version.
I did a make install , answered the questions, and my firewall has been up 64 days since the last time I moved the machine, and it works like a charm.
Considering the entire distribution as worm-fodder just because one package hasn't turned out well is about as logical as deciding Windows is wonderful because the BSOD is a particularly nice shade of blue.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Who cares about the graphical installer it doesnt make the OS run any better except it wins your love for it at first sight. ohh look Superduper linux 2002 has the nicest installer I have ever seen but I bet the OS runs like crap and has problems.
Look at the windows installer it is fairley nice and very easy to use but then look how the OS runs..
I've been at linux for the past 6 years, and I've never looked back from the day I started off with Slackware. The distribution is always stable. Even, the -current version, is mighty stable, when compared to testing/unstable. If I could get it installed as a 13 yr. old kid 6 years ago, anyone can. The installer hasn't changed over time. It still gets the job done:
/. article http://slashdot.org/developers/01/09/21/1730210.sh tml
t s-user-linux.tar.gz
:)
1. Partition
2. Setup Swap
3. Select packages
4. Install
5. Configure fstab/gpm/timezone/etc.
Yes, dependencies are something that never existed in Slackware, but I never found it difficult to deal with. http://linuxmafia.org is a big help to get the binaries, in case u aren't in the mood to get on to a compilation spree, immediately, or are just in a hurry to get a package.
The FreeBSD ports system is great, and I think i heard someone mention it for linux in an earlier
which can be downloaded from http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/gnu-darwin/por
Slackware is getting better and better by the day, and I've seen very few Slackware users, that I know, who've switched to any other distribution, lately. The install follows the KISS philosophy, and its as fast as it gets, and relatively easy to the newbie, and more importantly gets the system ready, for more hacking.
Intuitive? Not really. I remember being downright shocked when I heard about how the sperm gets into the vagina. I was about 11 and been a rather sheltered child.
OK, then: the heart of my new NetBSD system would be tar(1), because that's about as close as I got to an installer while setting it up.
ok so they are making a better installer for debian but why dont they make it easier to actoually install programs in linux. thats what I hate. I know you can just double click on a RPM on some distros and install it but they should have some type of install shield for linux that makesit easier than ever to install software. thats the number 1 reason why I dont use linux that much. I would rater stick with double clicking icons than compiling my programs that I can not get to work 90% of the time.. maby it is just me but my life is aready to busy.
Daddy would you like some sausage?
Debian CDs are bootable, assuming your hardware supports that. In i386, in fact, there are 3 bootable CDs for the different flavors (you should probably be using the 2nd or 3rd CD to boot rather than the first, see the docs).
What I'd really like to see in a new installer is the ability to actually install the thing from a serial port. I always find myself hauling around a spare monitor from box to box when rebuilding my 3 boxen. It would be quite nice to remotely control them all from my desktop with a standard terminal emulator, just like I do with the big iron at work.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Debian installer? I think I maybe remember that, a long time ago...it's been so long. Never really understood why such an emphasis is put on it though...with Debian you only need to see it once...not like SuSe, Mandrake, Red Hat etc...where migrating to a new version usually takes a reinstall.
I dislike the current installer. Not because it is text-based, but because the existing text is not optimal.
Many dialog boxes I have seen do not have a clear objective: you need to read thru the entire text of the dialog box before you understand what your options are. The dialog boxes really should have a clear question as a heading, then a paragraph explaining which option you might choose, then buttons allowing you to select an option.
The current installer has a distinct feel that the text for each section was written by a different person. For a distribution that has the most stringent standards on most other topics (keybindings, file hierarchy, and so on), the installer should have clearer guidelines.
(Most of my experience is with potato.)