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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."
[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).