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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."
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
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.
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.
Yes, but only for FreeBSD and NetBSD.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
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?
Yeah, they do have long release cycles, but why exactly do you want a graphical installer anyway?
I've never quite understood this point. Bringing up the GUI early in the install process adds a bunch of complexity and failure cases, and to my mind anyway, doesn't really add any functionality.
What features of an installer do you have in mind that can be accomplished within a GUI but not with a text-based UI? And don't say "to impress people who confuse pretty with advanced" - why the **** should we care about their opinions?
One thing might be "to fit a reasonable amount of information on one screen" - which is why I boot with "vga=1" meaning 80x50 cells, and I think this should be made the default on boot-floppies, although I understand why it isn't (it would screw over those .001% of users that don't have VGA-compatible video cards or BIOSes).
This is like those BIOS setup screens that come with icon boxes, scroll bars and PS/2 mouse support. Does anyone find them easier to use than the venerable text-based BIOS setup screens? I don't. I find them confusing. Easy-to-use does not imply graphical, or vice versa.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
# 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.
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.
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
How is launching some InstallShield lookalike better than typing "apt-get install myprogram" and pressing enter?
Yup... no finding and downloading packages... no worrying about dependancies... no recompiling stuff by hand... just one command on the command line, and apt does all the work for 'ya. That's why I run Debian. Furthermore, whenever a newer version of any program you have installed comes out, apt will download and update it for you.
Frankly, if there's a means of making this model easier, I just don't see it.
if you're not sharing the habits of the inner gang that designed the software
:)
/. is a sign that the software is being used, anyway.
Yum, I'm a gang now?
I guess getting armchair criticism from an AC on
Cheers,
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Aptitude is definitely much nicer than dselect, but still not intuitive enough, in my opinion.
:)
:)
:)
:( (because of conffile handling)
The most useful definition of "intuitive" I've ever heard is "whatever the speaker or writer of 'intuitive' likes"
*eek* command-line apt-get
apt-get is a very useful tool, for what it's meant to do. There's nothing majorly wrong with it, except that it's not intended to browse the full set of packages, which is what most of us want to do sooner or later
(I wouldn't put "eek" before mentioning how hard it is to drive nails with a screwdriver, personally..YMMV (of course, there aren't any mobs of screwdriver fans roaming the streets telling you to drive nails with them, but I digress))
Graphical UI would help a lot, as you can make it much more eye-friendly with colors, fonts, and graphics, and have more freedom in doing the layout.
Adding a graphical UI to aptitude would require a near-complete rewrite, unfortunately, and there's a very practical need/use for a text-mode package manager that doesn't scare young children above the age of, say, 3.
I've thought from time to time about doing a GUI apt frontend, building on what I've learned from aptitude, but I've decided that I'd have to either (a) give away aptitude or (b) get a full-time job before attempting it.
I've heard synaptic is rather nice. I wasn't terribly impressed, but they have implemented one of my long-standing todo items, visual construction of filter terms. Newbies would probably like this more than typing ~b~D(~vhelix)
When upgrading packages, I'd recommend to make it totally non-interactive (at least by default).
Yes, this would be nice in many circumstances. Unfortunately, dpkg needs to be redesigned a bit first AIUI
However, proper use of debconf should severely cut down on interaction (emphasis on "proper")
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!