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."

Comments

boot floppies

[rizzo420]

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.

Re:Do Not Fix What Isn't Broken

[CentrX]

Testing works great for me, that's 4 working systems out of 4 I've installed it on. No problems I didn't get in some other /released/ distributions.

Debian Anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Best Way to do a Debian Install

[talonyx]

From my vast experience with this distro, on a high-bandwidth connection this is the easiest way to do an install.

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 :-D )

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!

Re:Boot Floppies aren't "aging"!

[danish]

In Debian terms, "boot-floppies" (notice the hyphen) is the name of the installer system. So the old, aging Debian installer is called boot-floppies, which is what the submitter said. He did not mean to say that floppies themselves are aging; they are still useful for the tasks you describe.

That said, the installer can and will still work with floppies, CD-ROMs, NFS, HTTP/FTP and whatnot.

Re:Bare bones CD-ROM installation media.

[quinto2000]

They do have ISO, but they are fairly well hidden. To save bandwidth, they don't link to them from the front page. If you can download the ISO, you should probably just use a boot disk and do a net install instead.

Fix it! Please!

[roystgnr]

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.

Re:Do Not Fix What Isn't Broken

[mbanck]

The only real problem I've ever seen with Debian's installer was the dselect stage, where most users choke completely.

I've read discussion on debian-boot, where joeyh stated that aptitude would advance into base and replace dselect. This got reflected in aptitude's latest ChangeLog, but I don't know if it will really happen. Anyway, aptitude is a lot nicer than dselect.

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.

I'm sad to tell you that we dropped old-style tasks for woody and did a new implementation. This is not bad, but it seems tasks got tidied up quite a bit and there are fewer around now.

Michael

Re:Do Not Fix What Isn't Broken

[Daniel]

As someone who's has to maintain boot-floppies for the last 2 releases (Potato and Woody) and was also involved in Slink boot-floppies, I can definately state that it is broken.

And people who don't believe him should consider the fact that "getting boot-floppies into shape" has been (if we can trust my memory) a MAJOR cause of delays in the last two releases.

(this is not to fault Adam, who does wonderful work, but rather to emphasize that the code is just too fragile to be kept alive)

Daniel