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

Do Not Fix What Isn't Broken

[Lethyos]

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.

Re:Do Not Fix What Isn't Broken

[Teancom]

Excuse me? "...debian is the only perfect destribution"??!? I've been using debian for a few years now (1.x days) and love it to death. But *perfect*? Apart from the various bugs and glitches from packages, the fact that I have to run unstable just to have a decent desktop (kde2.2.2) is *wrong*. And don't get me started on "testing" and how b0rked up that normally is (i'm 0 for 3 in trying to get a working testing system). Talk to Ivan Moore if you want a good rant on how people shouldn't be using testing for real workstations. Getting locked into cyclical traps of "this package depends on that one, but conflicts with another with depends on yet another which conflicts with.." is too common to be ignored. I shouldn't have to use dpkg to clear up messes like that, but I do. I'm a sysad at a company that is looking to switch to linux, and all I need to convince them to go with debian is come up with an automated installer. You'll notice that in the interview, they cover that: it's slated for the release *after* woody. I.e., all we need to do is wait for a year. And don't point me to FAI. It's nice, but I don't want to have to write my own installer, which is basically what you do with it. Mandrake "records" my choices, makes a floppy, and off I go. Don't get me wrong, I use debian for my personal workstation, but we're rolling out mandrake everywhere else...

Anyways, if debian is "perfect", as in it fits your needs with no complaint, more power to you. But for the rest of us, we appreciate the developer's hard work in trying to make a *really* good distrobution even better...

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

The Installer is...

[SpringRevolt]

..the birth canal of a distribution

otherwise known as...

ahem...

ah... lets not go there...

Re:I think it would be better to call the installe

[MrEd]

More like the breasts... it's hard to get started in life without access to some.

Re:The heart of any operating system?

[reverius]

I wonder what the heart of Linux From Scratch is?

The "scratch", maybe?

Unless... could it be... Linux!?

Solaris 8 Intel Installer

[Otis_INF]

Anyone who has tried to install Solaris 8 on Intel will cry tears of joy by seeing any Debian installer ANY time.

Policies essential, installer incidental

[Euphonious Coward]

The installer is incidental. Debian users run it once, and never again.

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.

Boot Floppies aren't "aging"!

[wowbagger]

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.

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:Boot Floppies aren't "aging"!

[wowbagger]

Unfortunately, unless you are familiar with the Debian distro and know that "boot-floppies" is more of a proper noun than a simple designation, the comment is misleading.

Somewhat similar to saying "I finally got my woodie up" in the general public.

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:Graphical installer?

[psamuels]

In other words, we'll see a graphical Debian installer around 2010 or so?

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.