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

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: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