A Better Installer for Debian?

F1re writes "Linux User mag in Germany has decided to include Debian on the mag and wants to make a more user friendly installer. They are looking for help from Debian developers. More info here Linux User"

Comments

beginner friendly

[Fruit]

The Debian installer is already plenty user friendly, just not beginner friendly. Quite a difference if you ask me (and sometimes even opposites!)

Re:beginner friendly

[Llanfairpwllgwyngyll]

That is mostly true.

However (dons flameproof suit...), take a look at the range of hardware that SuSE and Redhat supports out of the box without difficulty - including PCMCIA etc.

I'm a committed Debian user + supporter - but there IS a need for better a installation process...

Re:beginner friendly

[October_30th]

plenty user friendly, just not beginner friendly

Ah my friend, you're well versed in speaking the official, party approved Open Source Speak.

By artificially separating general user friendliness into arbitrary subgroups so that you can feel elite just because you can use something as horrid as emacs to edit text files is just ridiculous.

Most open source software is not user friendly with programs like emacs which is mother of all the user unfriendly software in general. It is not beginner friendly and it is not user friendly. It might be efficient when you bother wasting countless hours learning how to use it, but efficient still doesn't make it user friendly.

User friendly software is software that's friendly both to powerusers and beginners alike. From the start. Without manuals, FAQs and HOWTOs.

Re:beginner friendly

[yatest5]

The Debian installer is already plenty user friendly, just not beginner friendly. Quite a difference if you ask me (and sometimes even opposites!)

This may be waayyyyyy out of leftfield, but isn't someone installing something by definition a beginner?

Re:beginner friendly

[Rhinobird]

Not unless the fragged thier filesystem to the point it would take longer to repair than just re-install.

clickety clackety enter...no wait! i meant to do that in my home directory!...ah shit was I logged in as root?!?!?! f@^#$!!!! Well that's just great...where's my install cd....(45 minutes of assorted swearing)

Re:beginner friendly

[stuphi]

Possibly, and by taking the time to read the prompts in the Debian installer, they will learn something of how there system works.

Re:beginner friendly

[Bryan Andersen]

The Debian installer is already plenty user friendly, just not beginner friendly. Quite a difference if you ask me (and sometimes even opposites!)

This may be waayyyyyy out of leftfield, but isn't someone installing something by definition a beginner?

Not always. I'd been using and administering UNIX for a decade before I first installed Slackware Linux. A few years latter when I changed to Debian I sure wasn't a beginner Linux or UNIX.

Now I will agree that Debian needs a more user friendly installation process. I for one would like to see a better breakdown of the packages into the functionality they provide. I haven't figured out the best way to do it, but it could be provided without much change to the current dselect system. It would mainly take a different classification hierarchy. Alot more fine grained than they have right now. I'd like to be able to go find a listing of "terminal programs" and select from that list, then go on to "browsers", etc.. I don't know of any Linux of *BSD distribution that provides that level of selection yet. Integrating sugestions as to complimentary packages would also be nice. That part would likely take a bit more work than just reclassification.

Re:beginner friendly

[Richard_at_work]

God, dare i say it? Oh hell here goes, imagine a beo..... oh no wrong one, ahh here it is, Dont u ever back up? Back up back up back up back up. Restoring from a backup is so much easier than trying to get your system to the point where u destroyed it.

Re:beginner friendly

[Richard_at_work]

to see a better breakdown of the packages into the functionality they provide.

Dselect :) not that i ever use it cause its soooo user unfriendly....... which brings me to another point...........

Re:beginner friendly

[Anonymous Coward]

> However (dons flameproof suit...), take a look at
> the range of hardware that SuSE and Redhat
> supports out of the box without difficulty -
> including PCMCIA etc.

FWIW, I just installed Debian 3.0 on a laptop yesterday and it came with PCMCIA support (at least my network card was supported) right out of the box.

My feeling is that the big difference in the Debian installer is that it does much less hardware autodetection.

Beyond that though, when you start wrapping things up in pretty / fluffy graphics, you usually end up obfuscating what is really going on which makes it really difficult to resolve non-standard situations.

Re:beginner friendly

[Genom]

Restoring from a backup is so much easier than trying to get your system to the point where u destroyed it.

Sure, unless it's so completely inconvenient to pull a proper backup that a reinstall is more manageable. For "modern" machines, this generally isn't an issue, as most have some easy removable mass-storage available (eg: CD-R/CD-RW, etc...) - but some older machines, particularly ones like my laptop, fall into a bit of a weird area.

Sure - I suppose I could transfer a couple gigabytes out over the network to do a proper backup -- but it's quicker and easier to just pull:

# dpkg --get-selections >selections.txt

...store that file, along with a custom kernel package (older laptops like mine need rather exotic hardware support that isn't in the default kernels) somewhere down /home (which is, of course, a seperate partition from the rest of the system ;P ).

Then, if/when I do something stupid, it's a quick reformat of all but /home, a trip through the Debian installer to install the base system, install my kernel, then:

# dpkg --set-selections <selections.txt
# apt-get -u dist-upgrade

...and I'm pretty much right back where I started. I can get the whole process done in about 1/2 hour - which is a bit shorter than backing up and restoring everyhing =)

Now, if I had a CD-R on the laptop, that would be a different story. Sure, I could get an external one - but that money (IMHO) would be better spent on a better laptop a few years down the road.

Re:beginner friendly

[jilles]

What it does it does in a userfriendly way. The problem is that once it has done its thing you need to do a lot yourself to get a somewhat useable box. I think it sucks that it doesn't recognize any hardware. I actually had to remove the cover from a box once to find out what kind of NIC it had. The same applies to the videocard and monitor I have. All of it is pnp meaning that the installer shouldn't waste my time by requiring me to provide information it already has readily available.

I couldn't care less whether the installer is text based or graphical. What I do care about is that the installer saves me time. If I pop in a windows XP cd in a (compatible) PC I don't have to do anything. It just installs itself, recognizes all hardware and you end up with a useable box. With debian I have to do everything (including the tedious stupid stuff) manually. If you are lucky and select the right modules and all you end up with a login box to an outdated wm/xfree combination on an outdated kernel.

Being able to bypass hw detection is a desirable feature on debian (or any OS in fact). Not having hardware detection is bloody annoying and very user unfriendly.

Re:beginner friendly

[Richard_at_work]

U have debian on a LAPTOP?!?!?!?! Do u like whips and chains as well? :)

Re:beginner friendly

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, so you back up to a seperate partition, but what about when the hard drive fails? your still going to loose all your data.

Re:beginner friendly

[txtger]

Sorry, but I don't think that is completely true. Users do exist in various subgroups, and thus user-friendliness exists in the same manner.

For example, a friend of mine recently purchased a computer game for his 2 year old daughter. She understood the interface completely. Even without labels, she knew to click on the pencil to be able to color in the various characters and she knew to click on the toilet to hear a gurgling sound, which her laugh.

I, on the other hand, was completely clueless. She handed me the mouse and wanted me to play, and I couldn't figure out one thing about the interface.

On the other hand, I love vi. And I didn't really spend tons of time learning to use vi. I sat down, a computer science professor gave me the needed instruction (press i to insert text, a to append text, etc.) and I started using it. Now I'm hooked on vi, and even when I'm working with text in windows I use a windows port of vi over other text editors.

I don't feel that user-friendly can simply be determined by the friendliness to users, basically. How on earth could my parents, for example, pick up perl with no training. I couldn't do it, and neither could they. Does that mean that perl is not user friendly? By no means. It's one of the easiest languages I've ever dealt with. You have to look at the tool, who it's meant for, and what it's meant to do when you determine user-friendliness.

While I'll agree that the debian installer is a bit difficult to get used to, I must also admit that that's more because I'm not used to it. At the same time, I know people who have had problems using Microsoft Word, simply because they weren't used to it. So, I would agree that the debian installer isn't beginner friendly...but at the same time it is user-friendly. The masses using and loving debian are living proof.

Re:beginner friendly

[Chundra]

Blah. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about. Emacs is a programmable editor for programmers. It's programmer friendly.

Re:beginner friendly

[Anonymous Coward]

U have debian on a LAPTOP?!?!?!?! Do u like hips and chains as well? :)

ROFL!!

Re:beginner friendly

[kriebz]

I'd think you'd know what modules your NICs need, but certainly wouldn't expect this for new users. I recently went from RH to Debian, and rather like it, but man, you NEED THE HELP of someone who ALREADY INSTALLED it. there are little hacks you need to do all the time to keep upgrades smooth get your hardware working. Nothing too hard, but it's not obvious. For a new user to do somthing on his own, it has to be really obvious.

Re:beginner friendly

[kigrwik]

Very good point.

A quick correction, if I remember correctly (my Debian box is at home) I think it should be

# apt-get -u dselect-upgrade
^^^^^^^

rather than "dist-upgrade".

Re:beginner friendly

[October_30th]

I have had the displeasure to use Emacs since 1992.

I had just been accepted to a CS program at a university and it was my first CS course. I went in with the wide-eyed enthusiasm and optimism of an 18 year old freshman, but came out of course as an embittered university student who swore to change his major subject to Physics at once. The reasons: Emacs and functional languages and Lisp in particular.

Your programmable editor for programmers is "From Hell" (apologies for Jack the Ripper). I don't you getting much programming done when you are stuck in some friggin minibuffer and can't get out or you're trying to find out about some arcane key combination from its abyssmal help pages (why are there several up and down the tree commands, for instance).

Fuck emacs. Fuck vi(m).

Re:beginner friendly

[B'Trey]

I run debian on my Dell Inspiron 8100. And as a matter of fact, I'm fond of chains, though not so big on whips. Don't see the relationship between the two, however. Debian on a laptop is no more difficult than debian on a desktop.

Re:beginner friendly

[Bryan Andersen]

U have debian on a LAPTOP?!?!?!?! Do u like whips and chains as well? :)

Yes and yes.

The laptop only has 8Mbytes of meory and has this pathetically slow 50Mhz 486DX2 CPU. Took 16 plus hours to load debian on it, but it loaded. It swapped like mad the hole time, but now I have a portable I can download pictures to while away on trips. Did I load X on it, no, I'm not masochistic.

Re:beginner friendly

[Hast]

To each his own, but if you hate Emacs so much why not use another Lisp interpreter? (I assume that's why you used it in a Lisp course.) It's not like there are too few out there.

And seriously, learn 10 basic commands and you can use Emacs just like any other editor. There are numerous "cheat cheets" which will help you with this if you don't want to sit through the tutorial. (Which begins as you start the program as I recall.)

Perhaps you should blame your bitterness on the CS faculty instead of an editor loved by ~50% of UNIX people and a language prefered by many AI researches.

Re:beginner friendly

[#undefined]

no, he was correct.

it is: apt-get dist-upgrade

this is the same backup strategy that i have.

i would also recommend archiving the output of "COLUMNS=150 dpkg -l" because get-selections only tells you what the desired state of a package is, not it's current state. for example, if a package is on hold, get-selections will tell you that it is on hold, but not tell you what version it is currently (which is the version you will probably want/need to reinstall). the COLUMNS bash variable (other shells?) tells dpkg to print its output using 150 char width. otherwise some of your name and version strings may be cut short.

Re:beginner friendly

[Rhinobird]

I would have to agree with that, however, who does backups? I don't have a tape drive, or a cd-burner, all I have is a floppy drive. Backing up even a small 4 gig HD would take forever. But it's just my desktop, and not anything important, so that's a plus.

Re:beginner friendly

[Rorschach1]

Right, 'Enter' is the first key I think of when I want to exit a screen, and Space is of course the logical way to get out of the help system.

WHO WRITES THESE THINGS???

There ARE good interfaces out there. Take Pine, for example. It's still my favorite *nix mail program. It's got a simple command structure, and the appropriate menus are always available. Make dselect more like Pine and less like vi and I might use it more often. Not that I've got anything against vi, I've learned it and use it often, but I don't have the time and patience to learn obscure command sets for every program I use because some developer thought that it was OK to ignore usability issues because it didn't need to be 'beginner friendly'.

Re:beginner friendly

[dar]

"Easy-to-learn is not always better. That's a lot like saying that a close-n-play phonograph is superior to a Bang & Olfuson."

Don't remember where I got the quote, but it applies here.

Re:beginner friendly

[muleboy]

Sure, unless it's so completely inconvenient to pull a proper backup that a reinstall is more manageable. For "modern" machines, this generally isn't an issue, as most have some easy removable mass-storage available (eg: CD-R/CD-RW, etc...) - but some older machines, particularly ones like my laptop, fall into a bit of a weird area.

I also have an old (100 Mhz, 8 M ram, 800 M HD) laptop running Debian. The easiest way to do a full backup is to buy a $75 PCMCIA network card, boot into a floppy distro (such as mulinux), and use netcat (nc) to copy the raw partition over to a desktop computer (assuming you have one somewhere). To restore, netcat in the other direction. Can't get much easier than that. Here are the commands to do the backup:

desktop$ nc -l -p $large_port_number > $backup_file

laptop$ cat /dev/hda1 | nc $desktop_ip $large_port_number

The only extra thing you'll have to do on restore is run lilo from the floppy distro to set up the boot loader. I can guarantee you this method is dozens of times faster than a fresh install because I have done both.

The poor geeks

[Jouster]

First Windows removes its real-mode command line, now Debian loses its undecipherable installation syntax? What will all the esoteric-knowledge gurus do?

Jouster

Re:The poor geeks

[linzeal]

openbsd of course

Re:The poor geeks

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 insightful?
+1 funny might be appropiate, but I mean, I really hope the moderators aren't really taking that statement seriously...

Yay we could post AC again ;-)

Re:The poor geeks

[Anonymous Coward]

fucking terrorist sympathizer

Re:The poor geeks

[Corporate Troll]

Oh, come on! OpenBSD is not *that* hard to install. Pop in CD and follow instructions. Boot, voila...Systems runs. Go on the internet with another box, read Packet Filterin Howto's and PPPoE howto's change config files, restart services and you're done. Instant firewall: it only took me one afternoon.

Compare this to a Windows 2000 install for example: pop in CD, install, go on the internet with another machine to hunt down graphics/sound/modem drivers (or if your WinModem is supported, even with that box). Install drivers, reboot, make registry hacks (so that the system is customized for my use). Now install the apps you need. Setting up a Windows 2000 systems takes an afternoon too.

Both setups you keep tweaking around for a couple of weeks. Seem both are similar in setup-time and setup-complexity.

Re:The poor geeks

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats fine if you are running just a firewall try using openbsd on the desktop.

Re:The poor geeks

[Anonymous Coward]

that's an unfair comparison of israel palestine deaths. like 3/4 palestine deaths are from suicide bombers who suck so bad they can only blow up one person, themselves. they end up mildly injuring those around them, and the only one dead is the idiot holding the bomb. i bet the casualty count is more reasonable if you don't count them. you should make a jews/nazi comparison too, that would be great.

Re:The poor geeks

[Anonymous Coward]

Compare this to a Windows 2000 install for example: pop in CD, install, go on the internet with another machine to hunt down graphics/sound/modem drivers (or if your WinModem is supported, even with that box). Install drivers, reboot, make registry hacks (so that the system is customized for my use). Now install the apps you need. Setting up a Windows 2000 systems takes an afternoon too.

That is often not how it goes for most people though. Since most people buy a brand name PC (Dell, HP, IBM, Compaq, etc.) they usually have a recovery CD. I've only had the experience of using the ones for Sony and HP but all you do is stick the CD in the drive and let it do it's business, reboot, and you have your fresh OEM system like the day you bought it complete with applications. Now, it's in no way a clean installation since they add all that crap onto it, but for the average person it's a braindead simple way to reinstall your OS from scratch.

Re:The poor geeks

[linzeal]

Intifada fact sheet

REASON DEATHS PERCENTAGE
Live ammunition* 776 60.3
Shelling** 302 23.5
Rubber-coated metal bullets 3 0.2
Prevention of medical treatment 36 2.8
Tear gas 10 0.8

Head and neck (Including 10 from behind) 330 25.7
Chest (Including 24 from behind) 240 18.6
Abdomen 62 4.8
All over body 499 38.8
Lower limb 8 0.6
Unknown/unspecified 93 7.2

Re:The poor geeks

[Corporate Troll]

You are right: I forgot those pesky recovery CD's. They are braindead simple, and make you lose all your data. I never use them. I really want to see an OEM that makes a real clean install for a change instead of adding extra cruft. (I have seen on a new Compaq, "clean OEM install" that it took all the memory of the system. That was when 64Meg RAM was much and that machine had 64Meg RAM...Just insane I say)
On the other hand: you could do exactly the same thing with any Linux distribution. As long as the hardware doesn't change the recovery will work :-)

One question: how do those recovery CD's actually act if you changed the hardware in meantime (for example, replaced the ATI Rage that came with the machine with a brand new NVidia card).... I'm pretty sure some problems will arise, so the "recovery CD" option is a very inflexible way to reinstall operating systems.

Re:The poor geeks

[sharkey]

What will all the esoteric-knowledge gurus do?

Compile a list of the scenes cut from the syndicated airings of the Simpsons, cross-referenced against different syndication scene cuts from international showings, indexed by chalkboard message and couch scene combinations, searchable by pig-latin syntax, using a search engine written half in COBOL and half in FORTRAN. The search engine interface will be written using Visual C++ running under Windows 1.0 installed in a dosemu session.

Then, convert the entire project to 5 lines of Perl code.

Re:The poor geeks

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know how much easier an install can get than Debian.

My first install was RedHat ages ago. I used it for a little bit. Didn't like it that much. Never went through another install.

My very next install was Debian and I've been using it ever since. It's simple, easy and powerful. I was really a complete linux n00b with almost no experience and I managed to figure it out.

Re:The poor geeks

[Anonymous Coward]

They'll join the Hurd.

*Ducks and runs for cover*

DrakX?

[leviramsey]

Mandrake's installer is GPL. It shouldn't be too exceptionally difficult to port it to Debian...

Re:DrakX?

[October_30th]

I guess you're right.

Why bother though when a new version of Debian seems to come out every five years. Like most stuff on the current stable Debian distro (XFree 3.x for christsake!?!), DrakX would be out of date by then.

Re:DrakX?

[staili]

> Mandrake's installer is GPL. It shouldn't be too exceptionally difficult to port it to Debian...

There's some fundamental problems, biggest would be rpm/deb problem, it wouldn't be impossible, but it would be still hard.

Re:DrakX?

[Hemos (editor)]

rpm/deb isn't really a problem (you can go other way, too)

First on the block with Sun/Mandrake merger

Re:DrakX?

[fabiolrs]

Not to mention DrakX is great!! Im not a big fan of Mandrake but DrakX is awesome!

Are you good enough to use debian?

[staili]

I was able to install Debian after only few months of Mandrake, and damn I was glad when I had my linux-box fully configured and running. (After a week of configuring with vim.)
The installer isn't 'hard' it's rather "are you good enough to use debian?".
Userfriendly installer doesn't fit with debian's style. :)

Re:Are you good enough to use debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

When I started on Linux there was only one way to install. Insert the boot floppy and push "reset". Insert the root floppy when prompted. When you got to the shell prompt, use pfdisk to partition your hard drive (if you needed to create a partition). Then use mkfs on the partition to create a file system.

Mount the new file system and copy all the files over to the hard drive from the floppy. Then edit byte at offset 509 of the boot floppy to reflect the major number of your root device. Edit the byte at offset 508 of the boot floppy to reflect the minor number of your root device. If you were slick you had a copy of "rdev" to help with the job, if not, use a hex editor. Maybe edit your fstab too (I don't think Linux even used an fstab in early versions). Now you're done. Your boot floppy is ready to boot from the hard disk.

This method still works by the way. Make a copy of bzImage. Edit bytes at offset 508 and 509. Use "dd" to write it to a floppy. Now you have a boot disk. It will look for root file system where bytes at offset 508 and 509 tell it to look.

Re:Are you good enough to use debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, Debian was my first foray into Linux. A bunch of floppy disks, a 386 laptop, and a modem. Jeez, I didn't even know what a module was... Made me learn fast tho.

Re:Are you good enough to use debian?

[morgajel]

I'm actually wondering how they plan on making it more user friendly. I hope they stay away from graphical installers- or if they do use one, offer the text mode as well.(I have slow machines)

small changes could be made as well, I'll give them that. I tried debian after dinking around with redhat, slackware, and mandrake... couldn't deal with the installer, so I went back to redhat... then I tried sorcerer...
After a week of irritation, I tried debian again and it slid right in. after experiencing the joy and wonder of apt, I quickly changes all of my boxen over from redhat, but I still had that faint memory of it being a difficult installer- even though I don't remember why.

I also like that they offer a CD in their mag- pretty soon linux distro's will be as plentiful as those stupid AOL disks.

Re:Are you good enough to use debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux should be used by everyone!!!!!

Re:Are you good enough to use debian?

[Micah]

> Edit bytes at offset 508 and 509. Use "dd" to write it to a floppy.

Or you could use the rdev command, which does exactly that, but a whole lot easier.

man rdev

Speak to Progeny......

[Anonymous Coward]

Progeny had a good one, I use it and then apt-get dist upgrade to woody

Re:Speak to Progeny......

[Anonymous Coward]

Whats so funny? I do the exact same thing. I use Progeny to install Woody on all my boxes. Doesn't everybody?

Re:Speak to Progeny......

[Anonymous Coward]

In what way is this post offtopic?

There is one - PGI

[trh]

Progeny Debian Linux was a GREAT distribution, when it existed. It had great hardware detection, a very simple installer and some other features. Some of the best parts of it are now available.

You can use Progeny Graphical Installer (PGI) to install a nice Woody release, or download the package and create your OWN customized installer with it. This thing is GREAT. Check it out - they are pushing hard towards the 1.0 release.

http://hackers.progeny.com/pgi/

It is very nice, and has a text-mode and X-based installer (you can even do the X install remotely on another machine). This thing is great, and I use it for all of my installs right now. Thanks, Branden Robinson and team for keeping this great part of Progeny Debian Linux alive...

Re:There is one - PGI

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree... I still run Progeny as my main server.
Wanted to run Debian but wasn't knowledgable enough at the time, and Progeny did the trick. Nicest looking website by far, BTW.

To bad they had to go...

Re:There is one - PGI

[trh]

More information on it is available in this informative E-mail from Branden:

http://lists.debian.org/debian-testing/2002/debi an -testing-200202/msg00161.html

Re:There is one - PGI

[Sethb]

I loved Progeny, but since it died, I'm using Libranet now. It's not free-as-in-beer to download the binaries, but the $45 I paid was well worth it for a great debian-based distro that has been rock-solid for me. You can download version 1.9 for free from their site, but the latest version costs money.

Installing Libranet 2.0 was quite painless, other than having to swap two CDs several times, and then having 400MB of stuff to update via apt-get. Thank god I just upgraded my cable modem to the business-class service...

But, since the Libranet guys aren't too keen on giving away the binaries of version 2.0 (though you can download version 1.9 for free) I doubt they'd be too interested in contributing their installer technology...

Re:There is one - PGI

[Wolfier]

Yeah - PGI is an excellent installer, but why wasn't I given the option to run it when I boot the ISO?

There are a few good OSS installers Debian can use - Storm, Progeny...what we need is the endorsement of one installer as the "official GUI installer" so people can choose between the "official text-based installer" Debian already has, and the "official GUI installer" upon booting an ISO.

Re:There is one - PGI

[Anonymous Coward]

Frankly, I think the Progeny installer is better, and I wish the Libranet guys would use it instead.

Re:There is one - PGI

[Overfiend]

Yea h - PGI is an excellent installer, but why wasn't I given the option to run it when I boot the ISO?

I don't understand what you mean. ISOs that the pgi-build command creates are, in fact, bootable. Are you using an IA-64 system? In our experience we have to tell the EFI shell to boot from the CD-ROM manually, but conceptually this isn't too different from changing the boot device order in an i386's BIOS.

If you're having problems getting PGI ISOs to boot, please consult the users' manual and/or file a bug report. We'd like to know what we can do to make PGI more reliable.

Thanks for trying PGI out! With help from the community we can reach 1.0 sooner; we're currently at version 0.9.6.

-- Branden Robinson, PGI Project Lead

Re:There is one - PGI

[Mr. McGibby]

I don't understand what you mean. ISOs that the pgi-build command creates are, in fact, bootable.

I think his point is that when he downloads the debian ISOs, burns them, and boots them, he doesn't get any such option. There is no mention in the manual. The reason for this is obvious, but he wasn't trying to point out a problem with PGI. He was pointing about a problem with debian.

Re:There is one - PGI

[Wolfier]

I tried Storm and Progeny sometime ago, they're both pretty good systems, but eventually I went back to Slackware and it is still what I'm using.

>The reason for this is obvious
May I know what it is? The debian ISO I downloaded was from www.linuxiso.org - I know they're not official - are there official ones, and is there a reason not to incorporate the Progeny or Storm installer?

Re:There is one - PGI

[Mr. McGibby]

Well, I guess the reason that the debian folks don't include alternate installers isn't very obvious. I would not be currently considering moving to suse if they did. I assumed that most folks know that debian doesn't include these installers. That is what was obvious.

No No No!

[Tryfen]

I think that the basic point is being missed.

From the article
Right now what we'd be most interested in is some feedback by Debian developers and users out there

The golden rule in HCI is "Developers are not target users". Sad as it may seem for some people Linux Developers are no longer the same people as Linux Users. This means that, by and large, interface designers should IGNORE THE DEVELOPERS!

Users are the ones that matter here. As a first time Linux installer I don't really care about most of the things a developer cares about.
I haven't installed Debian, but let me compare my last Linux install (Mandrake 8.something) to WinXP...

All WinXP asked me was, essentially, "What is your Country and TimeZone".
Mandrake wanted to know the intimate details of my network card, how much swap space I wanted, what make of scroll-mouse I had, what sound card I had, what video cards I had (and don't get me started on XFree's Multimon support!). All this does is serve to scare and confuse a Linux Virgin. And if you want Linux on the desktop you can either make the world smarter, or make your products smarter.

Debian should not be soliciting people in the know - they know far more than the average first time user and are, consequently, useless for developing interfaces for newbies.

Sorry for the rant/misspellling/smell.

T

Re:No No No!

[Hast]

While the points you make a valid I don't think that's what they ment. I think they wanted to get in touch with developers who knows the Debian install process. I.e., the people who will make the installer.

Re:No No No!

[larien]

All WinXP asked me was, essentially, "What is your Country and TimeZone".

Yes, and it still had to be told 4 times. Put in language, keyboard layout, location and timezone. Individually. And it forgets each time. If I'm in Scotland, doesn't it make sense to be in GMT/BST timezone? No! The default is still PST (or EST, I forget). What it should do is ask for location and present a set of defaults for that location; i.e. for the UK, default is English(British), keyboard layout is UK and timezone is GMT/BST.

This gets particularly annoying when the VIA USB drivers keep screwing up the registry when doing large transfers (e.g. PDA syncing, copying data to CF cards) requiring a reinstall every 5 minutes.

Re:No No No!

[Balp]

> This means that, by and large, interface designers should IGNORE THE DEVELOPERS!

The developers are HOPEFULLY users them too, I think that developing for them self is one of the most important details in the so called open source community. If it wasn't for that there wouldn't have been any Linux, *BSD, Emacs, Vim, etc. In that case we would only have Solarism AIX, Windows.

> All WinXP asked me was, essentially, "What is your Country and TimeZone".

You must have been lucky, or rather unlucky. It asks aloot more questuions, yeterday my father called me in panic as he tried to get XP installed. (It basicly needsthe same infomation as any Linux installation)

Where you are in the world, (timezone, locales etc.) SOme basics of how to format the hard disk (use entire disk for OpenBSD Yes/[No]) and the basic network information. (IP/DHCP...)

Re:No No No!

[Kakemann]

I installed Mandrake the other night (8.2) and had no such problems. It did, however, ask me whether I had a SCSI adapter or not. Even a Windows installer will occansionally ask you such questions.

Are you sure you didn't select the "Expert install"? If so, why are you surprised when the installer keeps asking you "expert" questions?

-K

Re:No No No!

[mir]

Mandrake lets you _change_ the default values for all of these, but by default it does a very good job of detecting the network card(s), video card and all . Accepting all default options gives you a working system. Of course it is a pain to decide the level of security you want for your system (this being /. I am sure we all know why Windows doesn't let you choose ;--) and to click through the long list of extra apps that come with the system to check which ones you want to install, much better go out and buy them and install them from CD's one by one ;--)

BTW, I have tried several times to install a wireless card on Windows machines and never, ever succeeded. Mandrake figured it out flawlessly. Go figure!

Re:No No No!

[mccalli]

All WinXP asked me was, essentially, "What is your Country and TimeZone".

Asked me the same thing. I told it the country (UK), yet it still decided to default me to Pacific Time. Shouldn't the default be GMT?

And, after it knew which country I was in, it then decided to give me a US keyboard by default. Even when I changed it, it decided that I didn't -really- mean it, and kept the US keyboard and US locale as the default System-wide preferences. You have more dialogs to go through to get that sorted out, and it's not at all obvious that you even need to get it sorted out.

It also asked me half way through, after it had formatted my drive and copied various things and then rebooted. I couldn't just answer questions at the beginning, then leave it alone for God knows how long to finish the install.

You happen to have hit a real bugbear in all the Windows installations I've ever used there...

Cheers,
Ian

Re:No No No!

[rmstar]

Users are the ones that matter here. As a first time Linux installer I don't really care about most of the things a developer cares about.

I am a User and am happy with that. You are talking about the clueless user. If you don't have an idea what a network card is, and you don't have the patience to find out if your disk is SCSI or whatever you simply are bound to have problems even with your windows box.

I haven't installed Debian, but let me compare my last Linux install (Mandrake 8.something) to WinXP...

First of all, I don't give a shit if WindexPee is happy with asking you for the wheather - we are talking about debian here, remember?

But anyways:

All WinXP asked me was, essentially, "What is your Country and TimeZone".

What you forgot to mention was that WinXP asked you also to agree with the fact that Micro$oft has the right to modify your system at whatever point in time it sees fit and in whatever ways they find apropriate and that this might restrict your abilities to browse media. Oh - you did not read the EULA? Great! Congrats!

Debian should not be soliciting people in the know - they know far more than the average first time user and are, consequently, useless for developing interfaces for newbies.

(Besides that it is not debian asking for anything, but Linux User Germany) Do you propose newbies writing user interfaces? I will not use that, and newbies won't either, because it will be so incredibly crappy.

And hey, install yourself your WindexPee where the sun won't shine, okey?

rmstar

Re:No No No!

[forgoil]

You must be speaking about some kind of asexual longbearded hacker type of developer (you know who), but I don't think this view of developers hold true anymore. I for example (there are plenty others) am both a developer and an end user. I hate having to answer stupid questions (as if I care about installing drivers, do it for me, I love XP for this, works like a charm), yet I can easily be described as a computer geek.

What it all boils down to is that don't ask someone who has no idea of what the users might need. What the person might be should be irrelevant. It's like saying "don't ask males, females uses computers less, and we should ask them!", or to design a car for someone who hasn't sat in one before (The Dodge Viper wouldn't exist then).

Yes, I'm answering a rant with a new rant, but there has to be a stop to this "developers are nutcases" and "users are morons" missconceptions. As long as you don't completely lack common sense you can do this. And if you want help, there are tons of litrature out there, or you can read Microsoft's (gasp!) stuff about user interfaces on msdn. I think that KDE has a bunch of nice stuff on their pages too.

Re:No No No!

[siemce]

well, this is correct, but ... how many people actually install windows anyways? Most of them buy preinstalled computers at Best Buy, Circuit City, etc.
The most they do is an upgrade. Take look around, how many people are still running win 95?
It isn't all about the install process; if you tell the average user to reinstall his box it's like telling them to kill someone, they rather take it to the place they bought it from and have them do the job.
Debian installer is actually very good. First of all, it works on 99.9% (0.1% being my rs6000 :))of computers without tweeking or giving it boot options, and I had many problems with other distributions installers on the same boxes. Also, it gives you a choice to go to simple mode, which let you specify what the box is used for and the packages are installed.
Sure it would be easier for Debian beginers if the installer was scanning the hardware and loading modules for them ... well, if you think that would be a good thing join the Debian's deveopement team http://www.debian.org/devel/
One last thing, Linux has enough installers, and way too many distributions, maybe something should be changed in this area. Don't get me wrong, it is nice to some level, but that's the reason why many companies don't take Linux seriously. I've been working with several software companies to try to get them to port their software to Linux (they have Unix versions of their software) the most common excuse is that Linux is not consistant, too many distros, too many directions.

Re:No No No!

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a User and am happy with that.

I didn't just hear that.

Re:No No No!

[CapnKirk]

There is a fact that everyone seems to be overlooking: most systems are shipped with the OS pre-installed. Any OS install is technical--by definition! Ya gotta know your hardware!

No matter how "easy" installers become (and I'm a Debian enthusaist), the first step of installation is researching the motherboard, video and network cards, and an idea of how the box is going to be used (workstation, server, laptop, etc.).

I'm getting ready to install a dual-boot Win2k/Debian on my new Dell Latitude C400 laptop (yumm: 1GB RAM, 40GB disk, all in a 1.5in thick, 3.5lb package). It's taken me about two weeks to do the research and I'm glad I did: there are issues with the Intel video chipset and X-Windows. It saved me some frustration.

But no way can the newbie or Joe Sixpack be expected to do this. Linux installation is always going to require some technical savvy, like any OS.

Re:No No No!

[SerpentMage]

While I thought that would be a good way to do things as well I ran into several situations where that does not work out worth a darn...

I have an American keyboard, prefer Canadian settings, but live in Switzerland. So what settings should be default?

The settings that are default are according to the version of Windows you use. For example if you buy UK Windows you get UK settings German Windows you get German settings. That I think would be the most logical solution.

Re:No No No!

[Tryfen]

:-) true I was exagerating slightly about developers. But it is worth remembering that the developers' mental model of the software will be completley different from the typical end users'.

What it boils down to is talking to the potential users. They're the ones you want to enjoy using your product.

Re:No No No!

[Anonymous Coward]

Genius, he compared Linux to WinXP because WinXP's ease of use is what WinXP is shooting for.

And hey, install yourself your Lunix where the sun won't shine, okey(sic)?

Re:No No No!

[oyenstikker]

designers should NOT ignore the developers. A user can learn how the computer works. A computer cannot learn how the user works. Programs should be developed for the computer, and users should learn how to use the program. Developers know how the computer works. Users don't. When developers design the system, you get things like *N?X. When users design the system (or the system is designed around the users), you get things like Windows 9x. Users just need to learn the system. Documentation, Documentation, Documentation.

Re:No No No!

[larien]

Fine, you're an exception; it should allow those settings but it should at least default to the "common case"; i.e. in your case it should ask location (Switzerland), set the timezone accordingly and give defaults for keyboard/language settings which the user can override if he wants to. Something like "Windows has selected the following settings based on your location. Please change anything you don't like". That (a) give the level of control you want and (b) saves me having to tell it I'm in the UK 4 times.

Re:No No No!

[forgoil]

I couldn't have said it better myself ^_^

Dang, can't come up with much more to say than that, but it's nice to see a nice reply to my rants for once. Good stuff ^_^

Re:No No No!

[SLi]

I agree wholeheartedly. I'm an OSS developer myself and, frankly, I don't care if some user who barely knows how to turn on his computer can't use software developed by me. I won't try to make it harder than it is, but I'm *not* going to sacrifice flexibility and lightness for eye candy like installer slideshows or such. You know what's good about Debian installer compared to Mandrake, for example? Ever tried to install Mandrake on a computer with 4 or 8 MiB memory? And now, please nobody start with how every computer nowadays has at least 128 MiB, my old 486 laptop doesn't, and I USE IT. Why shouldn't I? It works for me.

Re:No No No!

[clone304]

Uhh. This is open source. The developers are users as well, and I don't think you're going to get a fuck of a lot done if you decide to ignore what the developers want. I can't tell that Debian even needs an installer, per se. I just download the root and rescue disks and put the base and driver .tgz's on an extra fat32 partition. Then I reboot with the disks, mount the fat32 and it installs from the tars. When it's done, I reboot, login, switch my apt sources to sid, and run dselect. I hit enter on the package selection page and it downloads and installs the basic utilities that everyone needs. Then I can install X if I choose and configure any services I need. It's really easy and it's one of the very few Linux distro's that lets me get away with not being able to boot from CD. I'd be really pissed if they fscked up the installer so that I could no longer install from a couple of floppies, but I guess nobody else cares about that.

Either way, it doesn't make much difference to me, because I'm running Gentoo anyway. The last thing I want is a stupid graphical auto-installer that sticks me with all kinds of crap that I don't need or want. The way I install Gentoo, I end up with a tight efficient system that contains only the packages I actually want and has NO open ports. I don't think I've ever run another distro that installs by default without opening up a single listen port for some service I don't need.

I'm not a developer, though. So, I guess you can ask me what I'd like in an installer. My answer is control. If you want to run Windows and let Bill Gates decide how your computer is going to be setup, then go right ahead. If you want to run Linux, and have some control over what's going on, then quit whining and take control. Make up your fucking mind!

Re:No No No!

[Anonymous Coward]

Right on!
Win XP = Win XcrementPee aka Ol Sheis und Pee.

I never really muched believed all the stories
about people selling thier souls, but now with
XP I am forced to conclude that it is all very
real.
Click here and we _own_ you.

Re:No No No!

[Anonymous Coward]

Use text mode, you 31337 fucking prick. H2H. HAND

Theres always Slackware

[boltar]

Still using the same install system it had 7 years ago! (And its quite good too as long as
you don't freak out if you can't use a mouse)

cool

[sydneyfong]

This will give Debian quite a lot of publicity. Maybe enough for it to take off, at least in Germany ;-)

Personally I really wonder why people still use RPM based distributions, is it just because of the installer or the publicity? I mean, *everybody* who's heard of Linux must have heard of Redhat, but no beginner would have heard of Debian. Yeah like this "I'm using Linux 7.2, what are YOU using?"

Seriously I don't see anything potentially bad about making a user friendly installer, the one Debian uses now really could be improved. It's nice that they asked the Debian guys about it though. I wonder if it will get back to the main distribution of Debian if the installer is really as good as it sounds?

Re:cool

[Advocadus Diaboli]

Maybe enough for it to take off, at least in Germany

Debian is very well known in Germany (were I live). Of course many people use SUSE as well, just because SUSE is available in every bookshop while you have to ask for Debian.

I'm using SUSE for several years now and soon I'm going to switch to Debian for a simple reason: I'm sick of SUSE's "we are the first to have XYZ" policy. I don't appreciate to have software that is just in beta status in a distribution.

So I retrieved my set of Potato CDs and now I'm playing around with Debian in my laboratory environment (lots of PCs to try things out). So far I'm fine with Debian as well, even when there is something different from SUSE:

• SUSE installs and per default you have many things running. That means you have to disable services that you don't want (and maybe you don't even know)
• Debian installs with a minimum of running services. That means that I have to configure additional services and there is nothing running that I didn't want to run

A small difference, but from my point of view an important one.

Coming to the installation process. I don't think that Debian is more difficult to install than SUSE. Ok, the text based installer requires you to read instead of clicking around, but after all I succeeded in installing Debian without any problem that I couldn't solve.

And one final point: Debian installs also on systems with small memory while SUSE for example requires at least 64 MB for installation. And in some cases that's even too much...

Re:cool

[Anonymous Coward]

RPMs are very powerful, yet simple to use. You don't need to know much to use an RPM. But if you want more sophisticated control, it is there, under the skin. RPM is truly awesome, and very underrated. The real power of RPM is how it helps with configuration management. Its database is very powerful and you can do all kinds of querys to determine the state of your system. It is a pretty good friend to the developer, administrator, and end user alike.

Re:cool

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like to see a resurgence of National Socialism in Germany. You Germans must get a grip. Forget the propoganda about the past and cleanse your country of foreigners. Someday you will wake up and there will be no more Germans in Germany. It will be a third-world shithole packed with Turkish, African, and Arab rodents. The time is now to expel all non-white foreigners from Germany. The very future of Germany, and your own childrens' future is at stake.

Re:cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Germany is very strong in the use of linux/KDE.
/*I mean, *everybody* who's heard of Linux must have heard of Redhat, but no beginner would have heard of Debian.*/
We don't think that Red Hat is Linux. That's no european view. SuSe is very strong, but Debian is the most easy, and best distribution - if it is already running. It is very important to get a good first impression. That's what counts. Deciders love this. First time users will turn away when installation is difficult.

Linux user is a very good magazine, but what he writes is right. Almost every article starts with installation issues. Linux books take 100+ pages to guide you through the installlatíon process.

Re:cool

[alec314159]

Debian doesn't need to "take off". Real dorks, I mean geeks, already use it. And not only them cool guys like myself use it too. Debian is the only Linux distro I use.

Shouldn't be too hard...

[Bozar]

I recently switched from Redhat to Debian linux. I used the network install (because i have a fast connection) and i found that the most obscure part of the install was finding which NIC model i had (because they went by manufacturer code instead of human-readable names) If a prepackaged installer simply had something that detected your NIC automatically, with some simple instructions to read along with each install stage (easy ones found at www.linuxnewbie.org), then it would be a much less painful install. As a seperate note, something must be added to automatically configure USB optical mice, because as it is they are not (a huge pain for a user with limited skills).

dselect is already a good tool for choosing packages to install and seeing what is out there to install. Its interface could be improved somewhat (always going past help screens becomes a pain, and collapsable trees should be in to reduce clutter(and if they are already, why aren't they obvious))

This should put user-friendliness in, while maintaining most of the customization available in the regular install (after all, you could always ignore the advice...)

Re:Shouldn't be too hard...

[Peter Harris]

dselect is an HCI abomination, even for those who know how to use it.

#apt-get install aptitude
#aptitude

Aaahhh. *That's* better....

Re:Shouldn't be too hard...

[slipgun]

always going past help screens becomes a pain

Simply add alias dselect='dselect --expert' to your ~/.bashrc file. But I agree, the dselect interface could do with a major overhaul, although the program itself is more or less faultless.

Re:Shouldn't be too hard...

[dlbornke]

There is neither a need to use dselect nor to use aptitude - EVER. All you need are the apt-tools. If you look for a program:

# apt-cache search <search term>

lists you all available packages that fit somehow the search term (search term can be the program name, parts of that name, a description ...)

If you want more info on a package:

# apt-cache show <package name>

after that, you only need to install the usual way:

# apt-get install <package name>

I have the aliases 'i' (for 'apt-get install'), 's' (for 'apt-cache search') and 'si' (for 'apt-cache show'), which make work much easier.

Re:Shouldn't be too hard...

[Peter Harris]

Thanks. I haven't looked at apt-cache before.

I think I'll still prefer aptitude (current version 0.2.10-1) when I'm not feeling in a command-line mood.

Re:Shouldn't be too hard...

[klieber]

Um...correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't apt only handle required dependencies whereas dselect will also pick up recommended and suggested?

I thought that was one of the main reasons to use dselect over apt.

Note that I've used apt almost exclusively and have never used dselect except during the original install, so obviously using apt alone works just fine.

--kurt

Re:Shouldn't be too hard...

[jsse]

dselect is already a good tool for choosing packages to install and seeing what is out there to install. Its interface could be improved somewhat

dselect is definitely not for novice. Anyone has not screwed things up in dselect? A wrong keypress would deselect whole netbase, for example. At least, not to use dselect before you realize SHIFT-X could undo careless mistakes. :)

Ok, call me loser if you like, I still think apt-get is the best. :)

Re:Shouldn't be too hard...

[the_consumer]

I dunno, debian was the first linux distro I ever installed (potato). It took me a few tries, and maybe 2 days, but I got a pretty stable system going with no linux experience whatsoever. Granted, it's not as easy as RedHat, but I like having the option of selecting exactly which packages I want to install rather than having to accept a bunch of redundant crap that I have to spend even more time removing later.

Re:Shouldn't be too hard...

[ScumBiker]

I installed Fink on my OS X box a couple of weeks ago. I've been using dselect to get software. You're saying that apt-"whatever" will be easier? I do know that dselect is a kluged up mess. What I would love is a native Mac OS X app to front end fink or apt-blah, or at least an XWindow app that will run on Darwin. Oh well, until I can write my own OS X apps, I'll learn the cli version of apt.

Re:Shouldn't be too hard...

[jsse]

I couldn't agree more. Aye I spent as much time to install Debian(more for laptop) and I spent much more time to remove craps from a freshly installed Redhat to make it usable. Ironic isn't it? :)

Re:Shouldn't be too hard...

[wheel]

while aptitude is somewhat better laid out that dselect, I would hardly call it user-friendly. The curses based menus do, however, provide for a certain amound of nostalgia

Of course, it also gives me a non-obvious way to play mine-sweeper right under the nose of my manager.

Re:Shouldn't be too hard...

[the_consumer]

Wait.. so do you agree with me or not? ;^)

Re:Shouldn't be too hard...

[Anonymous Coward]

IMNSHO, the best feature of dselect is it's ability to list all the packages that have been added to the distro since you last updated the available list. Since I live in unstable, that's often 10-20 a day. I have yet to find another package manager which does that. I can't even remember how often I've seen something in the "New" list, thought "Gee, I've been looking for something like that," or "Oh, cool. has been packaged for Debian. Now I can blow away my manually installed copy."

Yes, dselect needs work, or perhaps it would be easier to add the "New" list to aptitude, but it's the one that best suits my needs. Maybe one of these days I'll take a look at adding the "New" list to aptitude.

Re:Shouldn't be too hard...

[paule9984673]

As a seperate note, something must be added to automatically configure USB optical mice, because as it is they are not (a huge pain for a user with limited skills).

I can second this. It took me a week to configure my Intellieye Explorer mouse and I consider myself at least semi-literate to installing Linux systems.

Re:Shouldn't be too hard...

[guilliman]

It took me... oh wait I never figured out how to get my USB optical mouse working under Debian. So, now Im using Mandrake. And I really wish I still had apt-get, ahh apt-get...

anyway, so if someone were to do something about making that easier to do during install I and others, I assume, would be of much appreciation.

Re:Shouldn't be too hard...

[jsse]

I couldn't agree more = I am totally agree with you! :)

Re:Shouldn't be too hard...

[the_consumer]

I was referring to your sig :)

Misunderstanding

[CAIMLAS]

I'm sorry, but when did "I can click on it" equate user-friendlyness?

Debian's current default installer consists of a group of sub-menus with descriptive explainations of what task each menu item would perform.

If this is an arguement of asthetic or practicality, then it should be thrown out. The only way this arguement for a better Debian installer could possibly hold water is if we're talking about the detection of hardware, which is marginally frustrating (I had no problems the first time I installed debian).

Re:Misunderstanding

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Debian and have for a good long time, but I tell you that debian's installer is, without a doubt, the most customizable and, therefore, the hardest to use.

I mean, shit, even Slackware is easier to install!

Re:Misunderstanding

[PigleT]

Pretty much agree. The odd bug-fix, and hardware detection (but then again, if you don't KNOW what's in your box, why are you installing on it?), oh and maybe avoid dselect like the plague...

Took me under a day to get a reasonable Unstable tracking system up and running from fresh on the new orkstation. As with anything, try it twice and then tell me what the pick-up curve was, don't say "oh it's not the windoze installer, what do I do?!!" and wail and whine.

Re:Misunderstanding

[p3d0]

if you don't KNOW what's in your box, why are you installing on it?

Perhaps two scenarios:

1. You are installing on a number of different boxes, and the labour involved in finding out exactly what is in each box is multiplied, especially if you make a mistake.
2. You know the manufacturer of a device, but not which driver it should use. (eg. does my D-Link network card use the Tulip or VIA Rhine chipset?)

Re:Misunderstanding

[Genom]

Agree as well - the only time there seems to be a problem is when you have some rather non-standard hardware (eg: an older Sony laptop).

I've installed Debian on everything from pre-built workstations, to self-assembled servers, to my laptop, and I'd have to say the only one that gave me a problem was my laptop (mainly because most of the hardware in it needs drivers that aren't included in the default kernel).

Compiling a custom kernel fixed the problem. Packaging it with kernel-package (very easy) and saving it away makes any required reinstall a breeze.

Now, as we move towards a newer distribution (Woody is supposed to be released "real soon now"), this may not be a problem, as the default kernel *may* support my hardware - but I'm sure there will alwayx be people who have something exotic that doesn't work out-of-the-box (so to speak, when there is no real "box"...). The same troubles hold true on the Windows side of things as well, when things don't work right off, and you need a driver download, although their proprietarity allows them to pressure paranoid manufacturers into only supporting their OS (but that gets into another issue entirely...), so more drivers are generally available from the get-go.

Would it be nice to have a pointy-clicky Debian installer? Sure...as long as I can type -expert at the prompt and get to the one I'm familiar with. Redhat did that transition right, IMHO - you can always start up the text-based installer instead of the graphical one if you prefer, but the graphical one is the default, so people who equate "graphical" with "user friendly" are taken care of. I wouldn't be upset if Debian did something similar, just wrapping their text installer in a graphical shell, while allowing the user to use the medium of their choice.

Sorry for rambling - need more coffee!

Re:Misunderstanding

[BlueGecko]

Who are you targeting?

I appreciate that complicated (yet perhaps intuitive) individual package selection interfaces may be really easy for you to use. But I promise you that they're not for Joe Sixpack. If you want Linux to pervade the desktop, you're going to have to compromise at least partially and go with what will be easy for the average user. Look at Mac OS X: the install process consists of clicking "OK" about eight times. If you want more fine-grained control, you got it (click "Customize"), but for the average user, he clicks OK six times or whatever and the entire install process is done for him. For 98% of users, this is exactly what's needed. For the remaining 2%, who are geeks and network admins, you can get the customization through the button; you can modify an existing OS X install and then burn an image to be copied onto a few thousand workstations of that; or you can use a utility such as Pacifist to select individual files of a package. I fail to see how an approach such as this would compromise your setup, yet clearly see how it would help the newbie.

And to those who say, "well, Joe Sixpack should learn more!" Recognize this: he's not going to. So you need to make the decision of whether you would rather he remain in ignorance on Windows or install Linux via a stupid, prettily colored interface. Your call.

Re:Misunderstanding

[PigleT]

1. Open up a shell, type `lspci -v'. This is not hard.
(You do *get* that in the regular installer, don't you? It's not as though `more /proc/pci' is impossible either, though.)

2. OK, suggest that to the debian-installer guys that a mapping between versions and kernel-modules would be a good thing.

Or, if point 2 sounds like hard work, then bear in mind we have Hardware-Compatibility-HOWTOs floating around as well.

Re:Misunderstanding

[saintlupus]

if you don't KNOW what's in your box, why are you installing on it?

Because I just fished it out of the recycling pile at work?

--saint

Re:Misunderstanding

[CynicTheHedgehog]

dselect sure could use a facelift, though.

Re:Misunderstanding

[Anonymous Coward]

> ... and hardware detection (but then again, if you don't KNOW what's in your box, why are you installing on it?)

Because the whole point of this idea is to make the Debian installer more usable to folks who *don't* know that their NetLink card uses the tulip driver ("tulip"? now THERE'S an intuitive name! EVERYONE can figure that out, can't they?), or their Turtle Beach sound card uses the cs46xx driver. Again, totally intuitive, right? What video driver do you need - well, anyone with an NVidia card would intutitively know to select the "nv" driver (assuming they don't think that means Nevada or some other product development codeword - like, say, tulip...), yes?

Part of the reason why the Windows installers seems more reasonable to inexperienced users is that they use the name of the product, not its chipset name. That makes it easier for users to tell the installer what hardware they have. Linux installers are *very* bad about this once the autodetect gets it wrong and the user has to step in and supply the correct info.

Re:Misunderstanding

[clone304]

1. If you are installing on a number of different boxes, then you're probably doing it from work right? If so, and you'll be running debian on those boxes, deal with it. That's your job. If not, then deal with it, or pick a distro that works how you like it to work.

2. If these are your home boxes, you should know what's in them or you should find out and make yourself a notebook that contains a list of all of your systems and all of their relevant chipsets (mainboard chipset, processor, network, video, sound, etc)

If you still can't figure it out, you should go with a Mandrake or stick with Windows. On Linux, if you ever need to recompile your kernel, you can save yourself a bit of time by knowing your system even if the installer autodetects your devices. Linux is not supposed to be Windows. Do you want control of your system or not?

.

Re:Misunderstanding

[clone304]

The Debian GNU/Linux distro is NOT targetted at Joe SixPack. It's targetted at professional sysadmins who want to run ultra-stable servers on all free software. The fact that they have testing and unstable releases and that a lot of users like Debian does not mean that those people are Debians target. If you and Joe want a pretty, stupid-friendly distro that doesn't ask you any questions, then use something like RedHat or Mandrake. Or you can go buy a Mac. I can't figure out any reason why the Linux community (the Debian people, in particular) should give a shit whether Joe SixPack, or you for that matter, remain in ignorance. If you think that Linux only exists as an effort to kill Microsoft, then you've got a lot to learn. If Linux does end up taking massive market share from Windows, it won't be anytime soon. If that is YOUR goal, then start coding your own distro or help out one of the many that is trying to reproduce a Windows-like experience on Linux. Why bother the Debian people? They already HAVE a goal.

.

Re:Misunderstanding

[p3d0]

Open up a shell, type `lspci -v'. This is not hard.

It is if you haven't installed the OS yet.

Re:Misunderstanding

[oyenstikker]

Debian is by the developers, for the developers. They make it because they want it. And they are nice enough (thank you!) to let us have what they came up with. RedHat is trying to make a profit, so they make it for the users. Linux is customizable. Pick your distro. Whats the problem?

Re:Misunderstanding

[p3d0]

If you are installing on a number of different boxes, then you're probably doing it from work right? If so, and you'll be running debian on those boxes, deal with it. That's your job. If not, then deal with it, or pick a distro that works how you like it to work.

The problem is that Debian doesn't autodetect. Your solution, apparently, is that people who want autodetection shouldn't use Debian. I would humbly submit that adding autodetection to Debian is a better solution.

If these are your home boxes, you should know what's in them or you should find out and make yourself a notebook that contains a list of all of your systems and all of their relevant chipsets (mainboard chipset, processor, network, video, sound, etc).

What the hell are you talking about? I thought computers were supposed to automate things.

Take a good, hard look at what you have written and tell me again, with a straight face, that autodetection is not a good idea.

Do you want control of your system or not?

I'd rather spend my time using my computer than trying to configure it to work properly. I just spend my whole damn weekend doing just that, and if I never have to do it again it will be too soon.

Re:Misunderstanding

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get to a shell from the Debian installer, it's on virt term 2 ( alt-F2 ).

Many beginners to GNU/Linux won't know what a virtual terminal, a shell, PCI, or the lspci command is.

Maybe if the installer did it for you, and you simply selected the one that looked right. Or the installer made a guess and asked you if you thought it looked right. But, I think escaping to a shell and running "lspci" in the middle of an install is an "expert" thing to do ( and I've had
to do it installing on specialized hardware, so I'm really glad it's there. However, it shouldn't be required for a "normal desktop" install ).

Re:Misunderstanding

[PigleT]

D'oh. That's why the installer should provide you with an `lspci'. Or if it didn't supply you with cat at least, I'd be rather surprised.

Re:Misunderstanding

[Mr. McGibby]

The thing about Debian vs. Red Hat is that Debian's package-management KICKS ASS. Everyone loves it. It has some problems, but everyone will admit that deb is easier than rpm. However, Red Hat is easier to install from the get-go. All people want is the best of both worlds.

Why is it easier? Because it doesn't require as much interaction with the user to install a package. All the intricacies of dependencies and downloading are done for you. You don't have to look up every little thing.

Creating software is about encoding some knowledge into code. Yea, sure I could write all my code in assembly, and sometimes I do write code in assembly. But Most Of The Time, I use a high level language, even though I know how to do it in assembly. Because it's easier.

Re:Misunderstanding

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Debian is true free software,free as in beer and as in speech.
And this is a potent weapon against MS prpeitary
nightmare vision for the world.
If it ever gets to be userfreindly enough for joe sixpack,then it could be the most powerful weapon against MS.
Redhat has succumbed to hubris and is gouging
and engaging in bullyboy tactics ? (may be inevitable), use Debian.

In short Debian is too good a thing to be left
for experts only.

When I as a Linux newbie went to install Debian,
I was apprehensive because I had heard how hard
it was.
When I actually did it, I wondered what all the
fuss was.

Re:Misunderstanding

[clone304]

"The problem is that Debian doesn't autodetect. Your solution, apparently, is that people who want autodetection shouldn't use Debian. I would humbly submit that adding autodetection to Debian is a better solution."

So add autodetection to Debian already! What are you waiting for? It's open-source.

"What the hell are you talking about? I thought computers were supposed to automate things."

Who told you that? I've never found computers to be that useful at automating much of anything that I needed to do. It doesn't do my laundry, pay my bills or wipe my ass. All things I'd like to have taken care of automatically. It seems that most of the time, unless I tell it to do something it just sits there idle.

I make a living off of telling people how to use their computers. So, I'm not too concerned with making them "user-friendly", not because I'm an elitist bastard, but because it's been my experience that no matter how "easy" you try to make things, people are still going to fuck it up.

"Take a good, hard look at what you have written and tell me again, with a straight face, that autodetection is not a good idea."

I'm not really trying to say that it's not a good idea. But, for me it's irrelevant and annoying. I'm going to recompile my kernel and set it up how I want anyway, so it doesn't help me any. On the other hand it gets on my nerves that the autodetect routine is going to try to redetect my hardware all the time, so then I'd have to go hunt down the init script and disable it. Then I'm taking the chance that someone made something depend on that for some stupid reason, so it fucks something else up. It's just so much simpler FOR ME not to be coddled in the first place.

"I'd rather spend my time using my computer than trying to configure it to work properly. I just spend my whole damn weekend doing just that, and if I never have to do it again it will be too soon."

Not to be an ass, but that's why every Windows user I know uses Windows. My experience has been that Linux is going to take an investment of time to setup and configure correctly. But, if you're really trying to get it to do something, like run Apache or ftpd or whatever, then it's worth the effort, because once you're done, you don't have to mess with it.

Essentially, my point still stands. If you knew what hardware you had (the chipset), you would have had a much easier time configuring your system and could have spent your weekend USING your computer. Do you think autodetection is foolproof? What do you do when the autodetect fails?

Re:Misunderstanding

[clone304]

Exactly! It's not difficult at all. I find RedHat's installer to be much more cumbersome. But, the myth lives on. I think people just get scared when they don't have a GUI. It's not like the installer doesn't have a menu-based interface. The most difficult part is dealing with partitions. Which you'll have to do anyway, if you want to dual-boot, or run more than one distro, or leave a partition aside to hold your /home directory in case you reinstall or switch distros. All this ease of use bullshit is really just shortsighted whining. I remember when people used to get upset that Windows 98 HAD to be installed on the first partition of the first hard drive and that it automatically overwrites the MBR. Now people generally understand that they have to install Windows first, and Linux second. And that they probably want to make a boot disk if they subsequently reinstall Windows. How is it possible to make this easy? It used to trip up everybody. Now it seems to be common knowledge.

People are scared of the Debian installer for the same reason Windows users are scared of Linux. It's unfamiliar territory. But, it's not that hard, you just have to have a general idea of what's going on. This is true with any linux installer that isn't setup to just wax your system automatically.

.

Re:Misunderstanding

[p3d0]

True, but I suppose if it did that, it could probably do the autodetection without much additional effort, and all this would be moot.

Re:Misunderstanding

[p3d0]

So add autodetection to Debian already! What are you waiting for? It's open-source.

Hey, don't change the subject! I'm not demanding autodetection. I'm just saying that having autodetection is better than not having it, at least in the installer (see below).

On the other hand it gets on my nerves that the autodetect routine is going to try to redetect my hardware all the time, so then I'd have to go hunt down the init script and disable it.

Hey, if you're going to use Linux, you should know what's running on your box. :-)

Seriously, I agree with you on this point, and I consider it problematic for the exact same reason as the autodetection thing: I don't want to spend my time tracking down an init script any more than I want to spend my time configuring the hardware.

Anyway, what I had in mind was for the installer to do the autodetection, not the init scripts.

But, if you're really trying to get it to do something, like run Apache or ftpd or whatever, then it's worth the effort, because once you're done, you don't have to mess with it.

Agreed. However, wouldn't it be even better if you didn't have to mess with it in the first place? Actually, Apache is a pretty good example. I wanted to make a website for an Unreal Tournament clan one time. On debian, I just installed the Apache, PHP, and MySQL packages, and the whole lot just worked. It was only when I wanted to get fancy that I needed to learn about the config files. In contrast, there is no analogous thing for my network card. If I don't configure it (ie. choose the right driver), it doesn't work.

Re:Misunderstanding

[clone304]

I understand what you mean and I think it's a good point. I just don't agree that the RedHat installer is "easier". From my experience it's much more difficult do deal with, it's package selection utility is horrible, and I don't have the option of installing over the net. Besides which, I can't boot it without major hassle because I don't have a bootable CD-ROM. I'm sure the CD-ROM contains some bootdisk images, but I'm not going to d/l a full ISO distribution when I can d/l a rescue+root floppy set and a set of base and driver packages, like debian allows.

I guess "ease of use" is all relative. For my money, it's much easier for me to have plenty of options and no fancy graphical crap-staller. But, ncurses-based console GUI's don't scare me like they scare some people.

.

Re:Misunderstanding

[CAIMLAS]

Here's something to chew on: if he's able to just 'click on through' an install of debian, what the hell is he supposed to do with the computer after he gets it installed? He'll be confused and befuddled as to how he's supposed to use it. Why lead him astray to think that the OS will be as 'easy' to use as the installer?

Re:Misunderstanding

[CAIMLAS]

dselect shouldn't be used, it's so bad. :) Forget a facelift. Just apt-get install all that you need...

Re:Misunderstanding

[clone304]

Well, I see your point. There's really nothing wrong with having an autodetect routine in the installer, at least on the ISO distribution. I don't install that way, I use the root and rescue floppies along with the base and driver .tgz's. My 3Com 3c905C, didn't used to be supported by default, either. However, the driver was included in the driver.tgz. So, I using that I was able to install the base system and connect to the debian mirrors to grab any other packages I wanted. I believe it used that driver automagically, but it's been awhile. It's possible that I had to do a kernel recompile before I was able to get on the net. Or maybe the installer had a screen that allowed me to choose it.

Either way, it works just fine.

However, I can understand how it would be a problem if you don't know which driver you need. I've been in that position before, and I just had to open up the box, find out what chipset I had on the card and pick the right driver (or google for the answer if it's still not obvious).

I guess it just boils down to this: Most people that are going to install debian are going to know that stuff or figure it out and move on. Next time, they'll know what drivers work for their card. So, it's hard, being a fairly non-commercial distro to get a group of developers motivated enough to code an autodetect routine that works for everyone. RedHat and Mandrake have done it, because they are trying to meet the needs of their market. The debian people aren't aiming for the same things. They likely feel that their time is better spent fixing stability issues and making package management and the rest of the distro work flawlessly. They are not really aiming for the average user market. I think their attitude is that it'd be nice, but they have more important things to worry about.

.

Re:Misunderstanding

[Peter Harris]

You *are* running linux though, once you boot the debian installer. /proc/pci is there, and you can indeed Alt-F2 into another terminal and 'more' it.

The installer doesn't make it very explicit that you can do this, but you can. You can do quite a lot before the install is complete. I suppose the root filing system is on a RAM disc or something.

Re:Misunderstanding

[p3d0]

So, it's hard, being a fairly non-commercial distro to get a group of developers motivated enough to code an autodetect routine that works for everyone. RedHat and Mandrake have done it, because they are trying to meet the needs of their market. The debian people aren't aiming for the same things.

Though, through the magic of Open Source(tm), I suppose Debian could just steal the autodetection code.

Re:Misunderstanding

[p3d0]

That's a good trick. I'll keep it in mind. Thanks!

Re:Misunderstanding

[Mr. McGibby]

I guess my point is that in all Linux Distros, there are too many options up front. Asking the user, "Which of these 400000 packages do you want to install?". The average user just starting with Linux is going to say, "Can't I do this later? I just want to install Linux and play with it." These aren't users like your grandma, those user-types are harder to deal with. These are semi-knowledgeable users. They've probably only ever used windows, but aren't stupid. They know about things like partitions, formatting, etc. They know what Linux is generally but just want to try to get started with it.

I know, I was one of these users. I was told that Debian was the distro for those who knew UNIX (I was a Solaris admin many moons ago) somewhat but wanted to get into Linux full force.

I was overwhelmed and confused by the number of packages. I just wanted to hit the "default desktop system" button and get started. But no, I had to select which of 4 thousand packages I wanted to install. Most of which didn't really need to be installed at the time and could've easily be added later.

fp

[Anonymous Coward]

fp

Too anal for user-friendliness

[Bernie]

Storm tried and failed.

Progeny tried and failed.

Corel tried and failed.

The Debian community is simply to anal to take on these "user-friendly" additions. I really wish they would do something about this!

Debian--'cos life's too long :-/

Re:Too anal for user-friendliness

[PigleT]

No. This debian user thinks that if someone isn't prepared to investigate a simple installer (what? read things? that'd never do) then they'll *NEVER* *bother* reading dpkg(8) and apt(8) - ie their on-going use will be crap too so no harm in "dissuading" the ignorant *and* lazy arses at install-time.
But ultimately "dissuading" is the wrong way of looking at it anyway. It works, it *is* simple - dead simple, just cursor-keys tab and enter - and there's no need to go around sticking pretty buttons on it that make people think "what does this circle with a triangle underneath it mean?".

GUI installers: Pfui.

Re:Too anal for user-friendliness

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, I used Debian for several years. I was drawn to it for ideological reasons. Then one day I woke up and said to myself ``why do I keep banging my head against the wall?''. I dropped the ideology and sought out something better. It was the best move I ever made.

The problem with Debian is not in a static running system. The problem with Debian is in the maintenance and upgrading. If you get your Debian system in just the state you want, and don't ever change anything, you'll be fine. But eventually you will want to make changes, and it's then that shit happens.

Re:Too anal for user-friendliness

[Anonymous Coward]

Lots of Progeny improvements are inserted into the debian main distro. I can imagine the same happened with Corel and Storm.

This is open source, baby!

Re:Too anal for user-friendliness

[zCyl]

# Storm tried and failed.
# Progeny tried and failed.
# Corel tried and failed.


So many companies try because there is clearly a market for an easy debian installer. The benefits and power of debian are wanted by many, but inaccessible to a large crowd who just can't grasp the current installation system. These companies are systematically failing because the existing debian community really doesn't want a proprietary solution, and doesn't want to commit to a solution not controlled by the community.

This will continue until a [Ff]ree installer that assumes less system knowledge is integrated into mainstream debian.

Re:Too anal for user-friendliness

[zCyl]

You know, I used Debian for several years. I was drawn to it for ideological reasons.
...
The problem with Debian is in the maintenance and upgrading.

I've also used Debian for many years. I was drawn to it initially in the pre apt days for its stronger security reputation, but I stuck with it due to its strength at the very thing you quote as its weakness. Debian is extremely easy to maintain and upgrade for lengthy periods of time. A Debian system can be kept up-to-date for many years without having to reinstall, or even having to dig out the installation cd.

Most experienced Linux admins can secure any reasonable Linux distribution. Given that, the primary thing a distribution needs to do to be of worth is allow one to easily add new packages with complex dependencies (apt) and to upgrade packages for the entire the system and easily obtain security updates (apt).

Re:Too anal for user-friendliness

[Anonymous Coward]

> Storm tried and failed.
Progeny tried and failed.
Corel tried and failed.

Um. The companies couldn't make a viable business selling a Debian-based product. ALL of these product's installers were well-regarded for their ease of use.

Failure of the entire product in the marked != failure of the installer to be easy to use.

Re:Too anal for user-friendliness

[high]

These companies are systematically failing because the existing debian community really doesn't want a proprietary solution

It might not be that many of these companies haven't got the well establized usercrowd to be profitable?

Re:Too anal for user-friendliness

[J. J. Ramsey]

Storm, Corel, and Progeny also don't constitute Debian proper, although Progeny came closest. There was no guarantee that straight-up Debian packages would work cleanly with those distros, so they really couldn't satisfy someone who wanted just Debian with a nice installer.

Re:fp

[Anonymous Coward]

At least anon posting still works ;-)
Propz to all non logged in Trolls. Logged in Trolls suck azz.

- Moomin da farker

Debian installer

[Dr. Sp0ng]

The Debian installer used to be awful, and you really needed to know your way around dselect to get it installed properly (or you can just install nothing and apt-get it all once you've installed).

I recently installed unstable, using the testing installer, and I was surprised to see that it doesn't seem to use dselect anymore! There's a much more friendly (although still text-based) utility it uses to select packages. Honestly, the installer really is pretty easy now (on par with RedHat, anyway, only a bit less pretty). It could be better for non-computer-literate users, but only stuff like the partitioning utility.

This was on alpha, btw. Things may be different on the x86 side of things.

Re:Debian installer

[dlbornke]

The first thing you have to do when you have installed your basic Debian system, is to start 'tasksel', which provides you with 'tasks' instead of packages. In a 'task' you will find all packages associated with that task (for example the task 'Developer' will contain all programs necessary to develope software under Linux, task 'X' will contain everything you need in order to run a X server, etc).
If the program is not installed, install it with:
# apt-get install tasksel

With 'tasksel' you will configure your system in about 3 minutes!

Re:Debian installer

[Anonymous Coward]

> The Debian installer used to be awful, and you really needed to know your way around dselect to get it installed properly (or you can just install nothing and apt-get it all once you've installed).

Apt-get won't help when the time comes to install X and the user needs to configure it. X hardware detection and config still needs work.

First Linux distro I have ever installed and had n

[rednuhter]

Debian is the first Linux distro I have ever installed and had no problem with it on ancient p200 with mainly ISA slots. (NOV 2000)
Except I had some grief with the SB AWE32 but thats another story :)

I still don't get it

[billcopc]

I've installed Debian dozens of times on many PCs. What's wrong with the installer ? Ok, the only tricky part I'd say, is the package installer. That DSelect thing can be painful at times, but the rest of the installation process is pretty straightforward and I actually enjoy how they present all the actions on the menu so you can jump ahead/back anything you like.

Re:I still don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Hardware driver selection is presented in terms of chipsets, not the marketed name of the cards. For someone who knows he has a NetGear NIC, a Turtle Beach soundcard and an NVidia video card, the knowledge that he needs the tulip, cs46xx and nv drivers is *not* straightforward, yet that kind of info is what the Debian installer expects its users to know.

Not yet ready for the average home computer owner. Hobbyists and professionals *always* know the details of their hardware - average users seldom know to that degree, nor do they want to.

dselect must go and friendly advice to the guys

[ajv]

dselect sucks. It's the hardest thing about getting a working debian install, akin to a purity or intelligence test. This is exclusionary, and the only way to fix it is to streamline the way a base debian gets installed. And to me, that means dselect must go. It's too hard and takes too long to get right. I've always found it much easier and faster to completely ignore dselect and add the packages I need later using apt, which is far more friendly (and actually works).

In HCI terms, you *must* understand your users. If your user base is educated professionals who have done hundreds of debian installs and can compile their own kernel without assistance, then the current installer is probably okay, but it's not where Debian needs to go. It has the developer Linux user sown up; Debian needs to add to the collection other types of users.

So we pick another user set - the Linux newbie and/or Windows refugee. These people don't want to know about installers, and you must make the interface hard for them to screw up. Remember in HCI terms, allowing the user to screw up might be powerful, but it's wrong. I'm not talking about GUIs here (even though I like 'em), I'm talking HCI and interface. You can have a very decent text installer.

Moving along... You describe to the potential newbie users why you need an installer in very basic non-prejudiced terms, so they understand the problem space but without suggesting to them potential solutions. Grab their suggestions and recommendations and experiences and write them all down. This is your specification to a certain extent. Users have a keen insight on what they like and they don't like. Ignore their advice at your own peril.

You create a first cut at an installer, constantly second guessing the users: "will my mum be able to do this?" "Do I have to do this now?" "Is this a reasonable set of defaults that don't need to be adjusted?" You want the user to make as few decisions as possible, whilst postponing as many decisions as possible to allow experienced users to customize it if they wish.

Once the first cut of the installer is done, you must get a bunch of new users, and watch them use it without assistance. Learn from the mistakes or missteps they make, and learn if there's steps you can eliminate. And of course, eliminate any bugs the users find.

Repeat ad nauseam until it's hard to get a bodged unrecoverable install.

Developers are truly the worst people to ask to do this. They *know* the right answers, and will not even think that there might be other possibilities.

A good OS installer is like the old A/UX 3.0 installer - it literally was a one button install if you had a disk ready for it.

Other OS's with decent installers are NetBSD (with the possible exception of the very confusing disk partitioner) or WinXP (very few questions indeed).

Re:dselect must go and friendly advice to the guys

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, dselect sucks. I used debian for a few years and switched to Red Hat, primarily because debian's dselect is so suckish. I knew what I was doing with dselect, and yet it was still awkward an clunky. What really, really used to piss me off were its suggested "optional" dependancies. Like, you want to install maybe a very simple utility, and dselect will spit out a list of bs, suggesting optionally installing emacs, fortran, lisp, and xdraw. And then if you forget to delete these "options" or if you hit the wrong keystroke (not unlikely with dselect), you will all of a sudden see 20 megs of dependancy bs loaded before it gets down to installing that 3K byte utility which is all you really wanted all along.

Re:dselect must go and friendly advice to the guys

[reynaert]

dselect sucks.

Yes. That's why it's being replaced. The new installer the Debian guys are working on will use aptitude instaed.

Re:dselect must go and friendly advice to the guys

[Anonymous Coward]

You do NOT need to use dselect. Choose a simple install method, choose the tasks you want (I prefer a minimal install to begin with, installing only C/C++ compilation tasks). This gives a nice base to build upon. The command-line tools are *perfectly* adequate to install other packages. You want X windows? apt-get install x-window-system. You want to see ALL packages to install from? apt-cache search . You want to remove specific packages completely? dpkg --purge . View installed packages? dpkg -l. View installed package files, view package information, view dependancies, upgrade, remove, etc etc - it's ALL there on the command line, and it's not rocket science.

I agree, dselect is total poo. But here's the scoop - you do NOT need to use it.

As ever, READ the docs first. UNDERSTAND how the thing is working before you write it off completely. As far as binary linux distributions go, debian is the sweetest to install and manage. GUI (graphical or ncurses) does NOT equate to "easy" at the exclusion of all else.

Personally, I like to encourage people to try out linux, but I encourage them to actually understand whats going on, and not install something point-and-click-stylee aka windows without a hint of a clue whats actually happening under the bonet. Although it's no longer a hacker-only OS Linux is still lightyears away from being a realistic alternative for the pointyclicky people, so I agree with a few others here there's no need to pander to people unwilling to learn and hide everything behind a GUI or similar - although I would agree some form of hardware detection would be nice, but not essential.

If anyone else moans about debian being difficult to install or putting off the newbies, they should be forced to install Gentoo ;-)

Re:dselect must go and friendly advice to the guys

[akc]

I might be me, but I found aptitude a LOT harder to use than dselect. Trouble was that it would often do things I didn't want, but it was not obvious how to do it differently.

Dselect is great for finding packages which you only have a vague idea what they are called. This is the main reason for me to use it rather than apt-get where you have to know the name of the package before you can install it.

I would subscribe the the view that dselect could be made more friendly - but I certainly don't find aptitude going in that direction.

Re:dselect must go and friendly advice to the guys

[Anonymous Coward]

Then "apt-cache search" is your friend. Stunningly easy to find a package if you don't know it's name. read man apt-cache. Sometimes it can return a bewildering list of results. I often find myself doing "apt-cache search . | grep foo" 100% success rate within seconds of finding your package with apt-cache.

Re:dselect must go and friendly advice to the guys

[RNG]

A good OS installer is like the old A/UX 3.0 installer - it literally was a one button install if you had a disk ready for it.

Sure, but that's because the Mac mouse only has 1 button :-)

Re:dselect must go and friendly advice to the guys

[rizzo]

> dselect sucks.

This is the word of God. Matthew 3:17

Seriously I couldn't agree more. Just last night I installed woody. This is probably my second debian install. When it came time for me to go into dselect I got horribly lost. I accidentally hit space bar, then return and then space again (or something to this effect) and the system ended up quitting dselect and saying I was all done.

So I thought "no big deal, I'll just log in from work tomorrow and apt-get the rest". Well at work this morning I find out that the base install doesn't even include ssh or telnet servers.

Despite what you faithful readers may think I'm not a complete moron and can usually get my way around an installation program, but dselect was just horrible.

Re:dselect must go and friendly advice to the guys

[ShecoDu]

You can always re-run dselect with the command... 'dselect'! :)

I actually like dselect, it's clean and simple, you just have to get used to it. If you find the starting introduction and the dependency message annoying, you can just add the following line to /etc/dpkg/dselect.cfg

expert

that's all! easy isn't it, now you dont have to keep pressing space all the time and skip to the chase.

There are some other front ends to the package installer, dpkg (front ends to apt, too, for that matter) like...

deity - Conceptual user interface suite for APT
deity-curses - Curses user interface module for deity
deity-gtk - Gtk user interface module for deity
aptitude - curses-based apt frontend
stormpkg - Storm Package Manager

stormpkg is a graphical front end (so is deity-gtk, obviously)

Re:dselect must go and friendly advice to the guys

[offby1]

For what it's worth, Woody's installer gives you the option of running `tasksel' instead of dselect. It's hard to imagine an easier installer: just click on zero or more collections of software (all with reasonably-easy-to-understand names), and it installs them.

Re:dselect must go and friendly advice to the guys

[clone304]

Dumbass!! Why didn't you just run dselect again? Or at least check to see what services you were running before trapsing your happy ass of to work?

There's no amount of "user-friendliness" that's going to predict just how much of an idiot you are. You are going to have to start thinking about how to do shit, before you hit random keys and fuck everything up.

BTW, you can usually just hit Enter during the first dselect package selection at the end of the install. I can't remember whether it installs the basic stuff at this point or not. But, then you can run dselect again, hit enter on package selection and it will get you up and running with a nice simple base system. You can then add anything you like with apt-get. It's really very easy.

.

Re:dselect must go and friendly advice to the guys

[clone304]

Dselect can definitely be a pain. But, IMO, it's very easy to get a working install using dselect. All you have to do is hit Enter on the package selection. If I remember correctly, you then run it again, because it doesn't install everything it wants the first time. So you just run it again and hit Enter at the package selection screen. It installs a few things and you have a working base system.

Beyond that, you give no justification for why Debian needs to change focus from being a totally free distro suited to sysadmin types to one that's chasing after the mythical market of Windows refugees and Linux newbies. They should look for a distro that is suited to their needs. Wouldn't that be better than taking one of the few distros that seems to know what they are after and having them try to do what every other linux distro is trying to do? I don't get it. You've got quite a lot of explaining to do before I'll even think about buying this:

"If your user base is educated professionals who have done hundreds of debian installs and can compile their own kernel without assistance, then the current installer is probably okay, but it's not where Debian needs to go."

If anything, Debian should focus on ways to make sysadmins' jobs easier, because that is Debians market. Maybe they should focus on tools to facilitate network wide installs and automatic updates. Maybe they already have this type of thing, I don't know. But they sure as hell don't need a crappy gui-installer that requires a bootable CD-ROM to run. It'd be fine if they had one as an option on the CD, but IMO, their root and rescue 2 floppy install combo should NEVER have a graphical installer.

.

Re:dselect must go and friendly advice to the guys

[Storm Damage]

Testify!

The EXACT same thing happened to me...I was trying to unselect a package I mistakenly selected or something, and then it says "You're all finished!" and gives me a login prompt.

Whoopie.

That, and auto-detection of hardware...Red Hat and Mandrake have auto-detected every piece of hardware in my system and installed correct kernel components for years. I understand that this is supposed to be better in the testing branch of Debian, and reading about this PGI thing makes me want to take another stab at it, but now I gotta find some way to make a PGI installer disk, and also boot to it, since my CD-Rom ain't bootable (grrr)

I really want to get Debian running on my pc so I can play around with it...from what I've seen and read it's rad once it's up and running...getting it up and running though has largely been a run up a steep, greasy hill for me...and I've been using Linux for years!

Maybe I'm just stupid (or more accurately, too heavily indoctrinated in my twisted Red Hat and Solaris methods)

Re:dselect must go and friendly advice to the guys

[rizzo]

Wow such hostility. I didn't run it again because I had to go to bed or my wife was going to throw the computer out the window.

I never had this problem with RedHat or Mandrake installs, so there's no reason I shouldn't be able to say that Debian's installer needs some work.

Don't go making personal attacks just because I couldn't get through some stupid install. I'm sure your mom is very proud of your debian skillz.

Re:dselect must go and friendly advice to the guys

[clone304]

I'm sorry. I was really just joking, but it didn't come off that way now that I read it again. My apologies. I've been through the same type of thing so many times it's ridiculous. The first time I installed debian I probably did it 4 times in a row before I got it right.

.

Corel Linux installer?

[magi]

Why hasn't Debian project adopted the Corel Linux (nowadays Xandros Linux) installer? It's absolutely best Linux installer there is; much better than Red Hat, Mandrake, or SuSE.

Is the installer non-free software or what is the reason?

IMHO, using the Corel installer would give Debian a big jump forward. Debian's installation, especially the awkward dselect, is definitely its weakest point.

Re:Corel Linux installer?

[Anonymous Coward]

For the same reason the have not adopted the excellent Stormix installer. Debian is not and will never be about user friendlyness. While years ago all other distros made an effort to be easier to use, debian is stuck in 1996. They refuse to use the "best of breed installers" already out there. Its odd but debian just refuses to adopt the great admin and end user tools that are available from other distros gpl'd. Unlike most modern OS's distributors, they are against things being too easy to the end user. They prefer that the user goes through a "school of hard knocks" first. Why I have no idea. I've tried many times to point this out but get flamed on the debian lists or channels. If you don't believe me, you ahead and try yourself. The amount of resistance to ease of use is unbelievable, and you will be told don't worry it's already in the "plan". Yea well they said the same things 5 years ago.

So in conclusion mod me whatever since I posted as an AC, but the truth is the truth, and debian is against ease of use.

Re:Corel Linux installer?

[clone304]

I find Debian's install to be very easy compared to that of other distros. I don't have to download an iso. I can boot from 2 floppies and have a working system installed in less than an hour. Yet, with RedHat, I either have to take what they give me as far as packages go, or I have to scour through a list of tons of packages to enable what I want and disable what I don't. THAT is not user-friendly. But, I guess it depends on what you want and what kind of user you are. I'm a user and Debian is friendlier to me. If you don't find it friendly, then there are other distros that will give you what you want. I don't think its good or necessary for Debian to try to be the same distro as all the rest. That's why Linux has many distros, so that each distro can tailor itself to users that want what it has. Don't you get it?

.

Re:Corel Linux installer?

[claes]

I agree completely. I think that Stormix had the best Linux installer I ever used, and I also agree that user friendlyness is not Debian's strong side. Actually, the Debian social contract says "Our Priorities are Our Users and Free Software", but since they don't define who the user is, there is no target user to aim for. And since most debian developers thinks that a debian user is the same as a debian developer we will will likely not see any improvement.

Re:Corel Linux installer?

[steveha]

Why hasn't Debian project adopted the Corel Linux (nowadays Xandros Linux) installer? [...] Is the installer non-free software or what is the reason?

It is non-free. I have not heard or read anything, anywhere, about Xandros being willing to donate it. It is one of the things Xandros was paying for when it bought Corel Linux, so perhaps they are not in a hurry to give it away.

But I have to say that PGI is actually better than the Corel Linux installer (call it CI for short).

CI has no text-based install. It only installs in GUI mode, so there is nothing you can do if it cannot handle your graphics card. And since it is non-free software, you have no chance of fixing the installer on your own.

If CI cannot handle your graphics card, the officially recommended workaround is: pull out your graphics card, put in one it understands, install, pull out the card it understands, put back your original graphics card, and then tweak XFree86 to deal with your card. (Corel Linux 1.0 could not deal with my GeForce2; I know all this from experience.)

PGI on the other hand does its GUI stuff with XFree86, so as XFree86 adds video cards, PGI gets them too. If your system will be able to use the card when the install is done, you should be able to run the GUI installer.

steveha

Re:Corel Linux installer?

[steveha]

the truth is the truth, and debian is against ease of use.

You are so wrong.

The Debian project is not just one person; it is thousands of people, all working together in a loose organization. I'm sure that if you interviewed everyone, you could find a few who actually want Debian to be hard to use. But most of the people working on Debian want it to be easy to use. We want it to be the best it can be.

The excellent Stormix installer, and the excellent Corel Linux installer, are excellent non-free installers. They are not available to the Debian project.

Also, Debian is very serious about supporting Linux on multiple architectures: Sparc, PowerPC, even Motorola 68K... and the current text-based installer runs everywhere. The Progeny Installer is not only available to Debian, but it was built in a modular way, and it leverages XFree86 instead of using some x86-specific video mode; so it should be possible to get PGI running on all the architectures Debian supports.

Debian isn't stuck in 1996. It is true that it takes the Debian project longer to get some things done than other versions of Linux take... but everyone is a volunteer (the Debian project doesn't have money to pay people) and when things do finally get done they really work right.

steveha

Nothing wrong with Debians installer, but...

[perplex79]

IMHO there's nothing wrong with Debians installer, but it requires some Linux knowledge and is therefore unsuited for newbies. A graphical installer which installs a complete ready-to-use system (KDE, Gnome, Apache, Office apps etc.) with some mouseclicks would certainly give Debian a nice boost. Btw, there exists a very nice Debian-based Live Linux Filesystem named Knoppix (in German). Its hardware auto-detection is better than what I experienced with Mandrake, so maybe whoever wants to build a Debian installer might want to have a look at it.

In my (university) environment I noticed that most start with Mandrake, Red Hat or SuSE and sooner or later realize that RPM is a nightmare for keeping a system up-to-date. Then they try Debian and are blown away by its ease of use (me included).

Re:Nothing wrong with Debians installer, but...

[Dr. Evil]

I hear comments like this, and I see the people around me using Debian, and the only conclusion I can make is that nobody is trying to use dselect to fine-tune a system. As soon as I gave up on it and just stuck to apt-get, everything afterwards was easy.

It is not the keystroke issue or the text mode thing, despite the fact that the keystroke combinations are pretty dumb, and the text interface takes hours to go through. It is that when you select something you didn't mean to, or you de-select something you did not intend, the consequences to your hour-long fine-tuning session can be catastrophic.

It is still mind-numbing to me why dselect would think that I wanted X11, gcc, perl and lilo(!) uninstalled. One keystroke too many I suppose...

Re:Nothing wrong with Debians installer, but...

[Genom]

A graphical installer which installs a complete ready-to-use system (KDE, Gnome, Apache, Office apps etc.) with some mouseclicks would certainly give Debian a nice boost.

I'm not disagreeing - but why limit it to a graphical installer? Why not have two installation "modes"? "Simple", which asks as few questions as possible, installs a usable system, then exits, and "Advanced", which asks more questions, and allows the experienced user to install only what they want to install, rather than what was chosen for them?

I'm talking at the lowest level here -- have install scripts that handle both cases above, then wrap whatever shell (text/graphics) around them you want. That way you don't end up with the installer failing because it can't figure out how to run X on a machine that won't ever run X in it's lifecycle anyway =)

Re:Nothing wrong with Debians installer, but...

[clone304]

Argh! The LAST thing I want is a graphical installer that installs KDE, Gnome, Apache, and Office Apps. What are you trying to do to me? I don't want any of that stuff. And, if you're not going to ask me any questions about what I want installed, then why does it need to be a graphical installer? Couldn't it just be one simple text string that said: Hit to wax all of your partitions and install a bunch of crap you don't need?

That would make things easy!!

.

Re:Nothing wrong with Debians installer, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. This is Debian, not Mandrake.

However, there is this program called tasksel that ran as part of my woody installation that did just that, if X-Windows System and Desktop User were selected.

Re:Nothing wrong with Debians installer, but...

[perplex79]

You're free to use the old installer. The graphical installer should be aimed at newbies, not pros.

NO NO NO NO!!

[Anonymous Coward]

We dont want a better install! how shall i bost to my friends under wintendo that I INSTALLED IT! Piff leave my debian alone.

Some thoughts

[reynaert]

"With this article we'd like to ask all Debian developers and experienced users out there for feedback on an idea we've had."

I wonder why they haven't posted anything on the Debian mailing lists...

The Debian people are by the way already working on a better installer. Woody will be the last release that uses the current one. This new installer will use aptitude instead of dselect for example.

Also, Linux User only plans for i386 support. Check this page. Debian supports many architectures, and the installer should work on all of them. Also, remember that Debian is being ported to non-Linux kernels. The Hurd is coming along nicely, and will probably released in Woody+1, and people are starting on a port to NetBSD. Again, the installer should support these kernels.

Re:Some thoughts

[Cro Magnon]

The Debian people are by the way already working on a better installer. Woody will be the last release that uses the current one. This new installer will use aptitude instead of dselect for example.

So, that means Debian will have a decent installer by 2020!

Re:Some thoughts

[the_2nd_coming]

that would be realy cool.....

Debian, The only operating system that lets you select your Kernel!!

hell, they should offer darwin, AethOS, ummmm OBOS(if it is compatable with the GPL) and any other kernel!!!!

Re:Some thoughts

[castlan]

Sorry, but any kernel included with Debian would have to fit in with the Debian Free Software Guidelines (the Open Source Initiative was based off of the DFSG.) That means that Darwin would probably not be eligible for distribution. OpenBeOS is BSDL styled, but the kernel is a distinct component called NewOS. I am not sure that this would be useful even if Debian were ported to the NewOS kernel, as the userland would still be Debian. Perhaps BlueOS or "New Atheos" running on a Linux kernel would be more up your alley.

Never mind offering multiple kernels, just having a port that could be installed over a Windows installation proved irksome to many in the Debian community. Debian does claim to be the Universal OS, so the W32 port should be valid and supported IMHO, because it adds viability to the Debian OS, even if it doesn't completely align with the FSF (GNU people).

The NetBSD port on the other hand, should definitely be emphasized for robustness and portability's sake - it would be a good stress test for the Debian tools. AFAI can tell Darwin only offers Next flavored NetInfo centralized administration interface, an outdated Mach Microkernel and the possibility of the excellent Mac OS X GUI. Rather than worrying about the Darwin kernel, working on GNUStep would be a more promising route, and the HURD would give you that MACH overhead you're craving. The "New Atheos" fork seems to be very similar to BlueOS, in that they both provide "modern" WIMP GUIs emphasizing moduarity and threading, with a heavy nod towards BeOS APIs and a reliance on the Linux kernel.

Of course it would be a great '133t feat to show off your system switching its kernel in front of your geeky friends. Since nobody seems to be prodding Mach or Lites in this direction anymore, you could always look at User Mode Linux or Plex86 to give similar apperance, by hosting multiple systems inside of each other.

cheers.

Why only for Debian?

[forgoil]

I would like to see a package manager for KDE (and those who do Gnome, probably want one for Gnome;)), and one package system for *BSD/Linux. Is there a single good reason to have a bunch of different ones? Especially knowing how good Red Hat is at doing anything (need I remind you of gcc 2.96.x for example...).

It's the same kernel, there are no need for special packages for different distributions. How come the linux distributions can't cooperate worth shit? If they want to add value to their distributions (such as is done with MacOS X and Windows XP, it's the same idea) that's great, but don't add different solutions to the same problem without _really_ adding anything. I am sure ever single linux user would love to be able to download the same package regardless of what distro you are on. And belive me, all those who try to support linux (iNTEL with their great compiler, nVidia with drivers, etc) will have a much easier time.

Then you can have your own package manager, like debian apt-get or a full blown bloated "want to be netscape and do everything by ourselves" super GUI app with IM, mail and a word processor.

Re:Why only for Debian?

[mschmitt]

Is there a single good reason to have a bunch of different ones?

Yes, there is. It's called Freedom of choice.

Re:Why only for Debian?

[the_2nd_coming]

freedom of choice does not supercede the ability to have better support.

RPM sucks, they should have gone with Deb in the LSB, perhaps when they move forward, they will APTize all the RPMS for use with the lattest Apt tool, but hell, just having one binary for theentire linux community would help everyone, and anyone who says that going to rpmfind and looking through the packages to find which has the dependenc you need is better than apt-get must be into S&M becase they like pain.

Re:Why only for Debian?

[forgoil]

Freedom of choice? What kind of freedom are you actually speaking about here? I agree that the choice should be free, but sometimes the choices are pretty useless to be honest. The different packaging standards doesn't convey anything radically different from each other, they are simply not compatible. For the same reason that all the linux distros wants to use a binary compatible compiler (gcc in all cases I persume, but the iNTEL compiler should work as well) I don't see why all distros wouldn't want the same packages.

This means that they can have their own management of the packages. One can go play with the command line, another can have a different kind of database to keep track of everything. Some might share parts of the management software (Like RPM is shared). But why would they package the same software differently?

I think that you are taking the "Freedom of choice" way too far beyond what is practical. Standardization (as if I could spell that word) is often a very good thing. That is why all scientists are using the SI system instead of the completely moronic imperial way of doing things with feet and Farenheit (I admit to not using Kelvin as standard, which is bad of me).

Re:Why only for Debian?

[SLi]

Is there a single good reason to have a bunch of different ones?

Differences in the filesystem layout. Especially configuration files under /etc, but also others.
If there were no differences, we would have several largely identical distributions. That wouldn't make sense.

Re:Why only for Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

> I would like to see a package manager for KDE

Your wish is granted - kpackage awaits, and has since KDE 2.1. It does .debs, .rpms, .tgz (or whatever the Slackware packages are typed).

Re:Why only for Debian?

[clone304]

The package manager is a non-issue. The package format on the other hand is an issue if you want to have all of the distros use the same one. The Linux Standard Base has settled on RPM, which sucks big donkey dicks. Deb packages are much better. So see, now that people have decided, they have to make people co-operate. I for one am NOT going to get stuck with RPM. I'd rather install Gentoo and compile everything from source. Ohh wait, I already do that. Nevermind.

To answer your question: The Linux distros can't cooperate, because they have different goals. They also tend to do things like start installer and package manager utilities in house. So, they end up coming up with their own different implementations. Once they have them, they don't want to switch to the other guy's solution. Despite the fact that they probably like their own solution the best, it could be a matter of pride that they won't use the other distro's utilities.

Anyway, once you try to make all of the Linux distros the same, then you negate the reason for having different distros in the first place. One of the cool things about Linux is that anyone can start their own distro. And, technically, you could switch over from one distro to another without even using an installer, but it'd be a bitch. Linux is a hackers' OS, made by hackers, for hackers. You can't get everyone to do the same thing if everyone is doing their own thing, get it?

.

.

Re:Why only for Debian?

[J. J. Ramsey]

"Freedom of choice? What kind of freedom are you actually speaking about here?"

As a practical issue, one can talk about the "freedom" to install on funky hardware. Autodetection is great, but it comes with a tradeoff: it tends to fail on old or obscure hardware. It's probably not a bad thing, then, to have both friendly distros targeted at regular users, who tend not to have the funky hardware that trips up autodetection, and more hardcore distros that account for the not-so-common cases.

Re:Why only for Debian?

[forgoil]

That sounds like a good thing, I wasn't saying "just one distro", I was just saying "have the same packages". It's the same programs that are being compiled and the same files in there. Both "I wanna use damn old and strange hardware"-girl and "Is that my computer?"-guy can install the same binaries.

No bloat please!

[Anonymous Coward]

First time when i installed a Debian distro i chose the Corel distro.
And that was a time when i only had 16 megs of ram on that machine (yes i know wery well).
The Corel installer vent on all night long and died at 99%.
Then, after that, when i got a taste for Debian i installed the real thing.
It only took about 1-2 hours compared to the corel 6-8 houers.

documentation

[oyenstikker]

Debian does not need a new installer. I, as a newbie, read the installation guide, sat in #debian on irc.openprojects.net and asked questions when i got stuck, and installed it and compiled a kernel in about 6 hours. (RedHat took me 1 hour, but I didn't understand a thing about the system.) What Debian needs a well indexed book of all the typical problems that people go to #debian with. It should have a list of common and not so common hardware and their chipsets and what kernel modules are needed. It should explain what packages what users might want, and why. It should explain Debian's init script setup. It should have a chapter each dedicated to apt/apt-get/dpkg/dselect, kpkg, networking, modems, cd burning, sound, printing, and XFree86. It should have some examples of files likely found in /etc. It should explain every option in the kernel configuration and suggest why you would or would not need it. It should be sure not to go over the head of newbies. If it is downright boring and unreadable to experts, fine, its not for them. I'd have gladly paid $50 for a book like that.

A web site where people could post exactly what hardware they had and exactly what they did to set up their system would be great. Do a search for your hardware, read what other people did, get yours set up, and post your list.

Re:documentation

[skaldrom]

There is such a site: http://www.debianhelp.org.

Re:documentation

[Anonymous Coward]

> Debian does not need a new installer. I, as a newbie, read the installation guide, sat in #debian on irc.openprojects.net and asked questions when i got stuck, and installed it and compiled a kernel in about 6 hours. (RedHat took me 1 hour, but I didn't understand a thing about the system.)

And you see no difference to the average user in the time it took you? SIX hours vs one? No, you didn't understand a thing about that Red Hat system - you could just start using it to do the things for which you bought the damn computer in the first place!

That's what is wanted from this proposed new installer.

And you can always find out about that Red Hat system later, AFTER it's installed and running, at your leisure. No user is prevented from doing so; the RH installer simply doesn't demand that a new user have that knowledge at the time of install.

Re:documentation

[Steve Hamlin]

What Debian needs a well indexed book of all the typical problems that people go to #debian with. It should....[snip]

I'd have gladly paid $50 for a book like that.

http://www.debian.org/doc/books

See also: http://www.debian.org/doc/

Need a better pre-installer

[Greyfox]

What I'd really like to be able to do is to sit down at a fully installed Linux system and run a program that lets me specify out the hardware configuration of my system and the packages that I want to install on it. It should allow me to choose whether to install stable, testing or unstable. It should inquire whether I have a network connection I'm willing to install the system over. It should then compile a static kernel from my /usr/src/linux directory to my specification and build a bootable ISO image that I just need to boot on the target system to run the entire install. Ideally it would be robust enough that all I'd have to do is hand it to a user with the instructions, "Just boot this. It'll solve all your problems."

Re:Need a better pre-installer

[clone304]

Great idea! Do you have a release date in mind? I'd like to know when to expect that you'll be finished coding it.

.

No they must be stopped!

[gorre]

For reasons unknown to any living man since the dawn of time the debian installer has been the gates to the distro of the geek. It has protected us from the suits, script kiddies and those evil "home users" who legends say may even have regular sex. If these people bridge the gap between us and society the results could be disasterous, what if the world sees inside the geek safe-haven that is debian! KEEP THE NON GEEKS OUT!

Re:No they must be stopped!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha Ha :-)

In my point of view it is a political fight. I care about what others are running. And debian is the most free linux system.

Re:No they must be stopped!

[clone304]

Then all of the Debian users will retreat further into the land of Gentoo.

.

YES!

[brunes69]

Finally someone who doesn't want to re-invent the wheel! For all the inherent benefits to Open Source and code reuse, the amount of code-duplication (and therefore time and effort wasted) in the Open Source world amazes (and disappoints) me.

And no I am not talking about Gnome vs. KDE. I am talking about things like having 10 different ICQ clients, all with different implimentations of the protocol. Sure, a different GUI and different features is worth making a new program for. But why not borrow the code for the network stack from someone else who already has that part tackled? Same with filters for MS Office. What is the big deal about KOffice, Abiword, and OpenOffice coming together and making some nice libs that translate .DOC into an XML format they can all interchange?

Simmilar things can be said about other softwares as well. Let's work together people! No need to re-invent the wheel!

Re:YES!

[metacosm]

As a developer, I completely agree with the comment on code reuse.

As an open-source user, I totally disagree with the statement that "code-duplication" is "time wasted", just because it doesn't produce something YOU use, doesn't mean it is "time wasted". That is how people learn, and having multiple "ICQ clients" just makes our platform more robust, because someday, someone will tweak, change and/or mangle the ICQ protocol, and 1 or 2 of those clients will be able to easily adapt to the new one, and 8 or 9 will not, and then some new coders will get interested and produce some new ones! I think multiple code bases that do the same thing function as a survival tool! :)

(Note: the aim protocol has been mangled multiple times, a couple of the text based aim clients made it thru the changes, many did not ... same thing for gui clients)

Re:YES!

[clone304]

The 10 different ICQ clients likely use their own code, because other peoples code can be a pain in the ass to work with. Many of the developers may just want to do the whole thing themself anyway. I for one, think it would be nice if developers made more of an effort to do things differently. For instance, had the first guy packaged up a library for working with the ICQ protocol and distributed that independently from his application code, other developers might have joined in on the project, making the implentation work properly and export useful functions for dealing with the protocol. Then you could have 10 different applications that use common bulletproof library code, but that contain different features. Unfortunately, many people don't think ahead about that kind of stuff and they just whip up a monolithic application and toss it onto the net. So, I gotta agree with you, but code reuse takes planning ahead.

.

Re:YES!

[brunes69]

Indeed, I fully agree.

Re:No No No! [slightly OT]

[borud]

The golden rule in HCI is "Developers are not target users"

In most of the cases you are right: the target audience should be Joe User and not developers, but I've made an interesting observation on a few web services where I've had the chance to have a look behind the scenes.

especially one of the systems was particularly interesting. the service they produced was one that is supposed to make life easier for you by providing a web interface to certain tasks that you would otherwise spend a lot of time on. the problem was that it didn't.
the user interface was so full special gags that it would only render reliably on IE 5 with the browser stretched to exactly the right proportions. for all other browsers it would be unreliable and often not work at all. also the service was incredibly sluggish because of all the UI sugar.

now, it turns out that the developers of the system are pretty heavy users of their own product. they spend several hours using it every day. since they too were annoyed with the utter crap that the web designer morons had slapped on top of their system, they made their own UI. and lo and behold: their UI was much better.
not only was it faster since it didn't make excessive use of graphics and UI sugar, but it worked in a wide range of browsers and for most sensible browser geometries -- plus, it had some new ways to handle certain very common operations with only one page load. big wins all around. it looked tidy and neat, and the fonts were actually readable on my screen.

why didn't they offer this UI to the customers? well, because in the opinion of the worthless people who are supposed to know about web design it didn't look "professional".

what I am trying to say is that when designing an UI, the people you should listen to are the people who use the application a lot. the case described above is not unique; I have seen this pattern many times before: developers make their own interfaces because the official interface is usually not practical.

but since we're talking about an installer here you would be absolutely right: most people will run across an OS installer very seldomly and it is absolutely critical that novice users are shielded from complexities. but it is also an important point that OS installers provide flexibility so users who know what they are doing have some choice as to which tasks they want to perform differently. (for instance I might have certain preferences for how I want my filesystems, but I might be less interested in having to answer 29365 questions about what software I want to install).

Use Libranet Debian

[Burz]

Libranet home page

This Debian distro seems to be growing rapidly in popularity. Good installer and thoroughly equipped with GUI-based administration tools.

The only complaint I have is that the CD does not boot with a SCSI-capable kernel.

What's the target group?

[hendridm]

I've read a number of good recomendations here from make it scalable to make it pointy-clicky to make it feature rich, etc. But it seems to me that anyone reading Linux User magazine would be a different set of users that those who might pick it up at best buy.

I think anyone reading the magazine probably has already tried Linux and have probably run it for awhile (perhaps not regularly, but at least as their desktop for a short amount of time). Do these people need the most user friendly installing?

I'm no expert at Linux either, but if I was a subscriber to the magazine, I would look for something different, not necessarily easy. I'm not afraid to try new and potentially difficult things, but I don't want the same crap over again.

I think Debian is a good choice, since it is different and very handy to use. If I'm joe-blow SuSE in Germany who never tried another distribution, I might be enticed by the CD that came with my magazine (1000 free hours of Linux!).

If I was currently a Potato user, I would probably be excited if my magazine came with a fresh copy of Woody when it's released. Then again, does the typical reader of a Linux mag really wait for a new copy of their OS to come with a magazine?

I dunno, I think y'all might be targetting the wrong user demographic.

Re:What's the target group?

[__past__]

The "LinuxUser" magazine is indeed made for those who have no (or very little) experience with Linux, unlike it's big sister, "Linux Magazin".

They usually feature introductionary articles like step-by-step walktroughs of some KDE CD-burner, or "Look, ma - if I hit Tab twice, the shell tells me what files are in this directory!"-type 'tricks'.

For these people everything except SuSE is something "different", and for most probably a new SuSE is as well. Additionally, those unwashed masses tend not to have broadband in germany, so a CD coming with a magazine surely makes it more likely for them to try some new software.

What it isn't

[Mr.roboto]

Straightforwardness is not what the deb installer is. I had 7.1, it was awful, so awful I never finished the install and waited for my slack 8 CD. The M-68K version installs with pretty much the same installer as OBSD/68K which is a good installer. The only way to make a good text install is to have it be straightforward and simple to use, not to mention putting all options in one spot so the user can decide. Help and extended info should be avalible for all packages, and Slackware has failed in my opinion on one thing, SuSE lets you pick from all the packages at once, which is why I believe YaST is king. Debian should look at Slackware's and SuSE's setup tools for inspiration, as a blend between the two would be nearly as perfect as one can get.

Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian is a uncommercial distri that is developed like free software. It's very stable and provides the better installation concept. Therefore Debian is quit strong in Europe.

The different RPM packages, that's a real problem.

Let's smash Red Hat and Gnome...

Are all distros for beginners?

[Publicus]

I use Debian, I absolutely love it. I don't think the installation process is that bad, but I should not fail to mention that I didn't get it right the first time I tried it.

Of course, it wasn't the first Linux distro that I installed. I started with Redhat 6.2. I got frusterated with that because I couldn't figure out how to compile a kernel in Redhat, and all of the docs I found that were Redhat specific said don't recompile your kernel unless you ABSOLUTELY know what you're doing.

Then I tried Mandrake, and after using that for awhile I managed to compile my first kernel, but I still wasn't completely happy because I found it hard to configure.

I tried Slackware, and oh did I like that. The config files in /etc were super easy to modify, but the package management system left a little to be desired.

This whole time I was learning, and becoming better at using a Linux OS. I was seeing the different types of packages out there, rpm, tgz, and the one I hadn't used yet, deb. So I had to give debian a try. Like I said, I didn't get it right the first time, although the installation is easier than Slackware. Once I did though, and I discovered apt-get, I was hooked. I now have three machines running woody and one running potato and I'll never switch to anything else.

It's not the distro for beginners. It doesn't have to be. It's a good distro, perhaps the best, and it's not for beginners. There is nothing wrong with that.

Re:Are all distros for beginners?

[big.ears]

But even beginners deserve to share in the joy of debian. And even experts shouldn't have to do stupid things like manually set up network cards when they can be easily auto-detected. As a newbie, I tried to install debian several times, and never succeeded, always crawling back to Windows. Finally, I gave Storm Linux a shot, and it worked pretty well, at least until I hosed my system. Having gained some experience, I tried to install debian again. No dice, and so after a few more months on windows, I tried Progeny, and its installer was relatively painless! After eventually moving everything over to Debian unstable (mixed packages from progeny, ximian, woody, and potato made my system a dependency nightmare) and dropping Windows entirely, I became quite comfortable with linux. So, I tried to install Debian again--this time on a laptop. Forget about it--I ended crawling back to progeny for installation, and then apt-getting myself to Woody. In my opinion, the main thing that leads to debian's reputation as a 'expert' distro is that only experts can install it. Once installed, its pretty easy to maintain and use.

Someday, I hope to make it all the way through the debian installer. I have a feeling that at the end, Samus will remove his helmet and I'll find out he's a girl.

Debian needs an installer?

[aderuwe]

Once the base system is up and installed (including /etc/apt/sources.list), the best "installer" is

apt-get install [name of software I need] (repeat as needed for all your preferred applications)

It will get all dependencies and the like for you. Setting up the base system is not too hard and only a few questions need to be asked (timezone, partitioning, ...). That and "apt" is really the best installer available for any Linux distribution at this time, IMHO. I'd never use anything but Debian again.

It is not user friendly.

[jotaeleemeese]

As both a long time Linux enthusiast (1996, Slackware) and as an specialist in HCI I can say with confidence that Debian installation is the less user frienldy of all the Linux distros I have seen (I have tried RH, Suse, Mandrake, Slackware, Progeny, Corel, SmoothWall and maybe one or two more).

dselect is the antithesis of what user friendliness means, I congratulate the people in the Debian project for getting rid of it to hopefully use a piece of software more fitting of the best distribution currently available.

Re:It is not user friendly.

[Fruit]

Dude, nobody uses dselect (except Ian himself maybe). Everyone else uses straight apt-get.

Re:It is not user friendly.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, few people use dselect to install or upgrade.
It is good for a quick peep at all the packages
you have installed, their priorities and dependencies.

pain of help screens...

[alder]

To avoid it:

echo expert >> /etc/dpkg/dselect.cfg

yes...

[GutBomb]

...but can I install it on my Dreamcast? ;)

The Installer Baffles Me

[waldoj]

Well, this is great to hear.

I built a new computer on Saturday, and I'd hoped to finally make the switch to Debian. Starting in 1994, I was a Slackware kind of guy. Somewhere in there I made the Red Hat transition. Starting about 8 months ago, I switched to Mandrake. Saturday, I was going to switch to Debian.

At least, that was the idea. The installer was less than descriptive. It failed to recognize my IBM Deskstar 40GB on a Promise RAID IDE controller -- both parts that are reportedly fine. At least, I think that it failed -- the error message was brief and undescriptive, without further recourse or details available. No problem, I thought, I'll do a net install. No such luck: it wouldn't recognize my 3Com Fast Etherlink. Not exactly a crazy off-brand of NIC. Not having any way to dump the terse error messages to a file, I did my best to memorize/scrawl the messages and Google for them, but that yielded no useful results.

With another installer (well, not Slack :), I would have tried a different class of installation, been given a more helpful error message...something. I can appreciate the concept of Debian being less-than-user-friendly. I can see how some people would like the inaccessibilty, to keep out the riff-raff. Maybe, on the basis of the fact that I couldn't properly work the installer, I am the riff-raff.

But, hey, Mandrake sure does work nice on this shiny new system.

-Waldo Jaquith

Re:The Installer Baffles Me

[dollargonzo]

unix errors are terse but not cryptic.

would you rather have a warning that suggests 18 things for you to do that *might* fix your problem? i'm sure the error exactly what was going wrong, and most importantly, nothing more and nothing less....

QED

Re:The Installer Baffles Me

[waldoj]

would you rather have a warning that suggests 18 things for you to do that *might* fix your problem? i'm sure the error exactly what was going wrong, and most importantly, nothing more and nothing less....

That would have been great, yes. The error told me, simply, that the hard drive was not recognized and that the NIC was not recognized. No suggestions for alternative approaches, where to get a driver to add to the CD, suggestions for different boot methods or LILO parameters to describe the drive geometry... Just a "sucks to be you" message.

The difference between the two is simple: Debian tells me what I've done that's wrong. Mandrake tells me what to do that will be right. And that's the difference between Debian and a user-friendly installer.

-Waldo Jaquith

Re:The Installer Baffles Me

[An Audience of One]

I don't know what the problem you had with this was, I have a Promise IDE card (not raid) and the same 3com card. Which netboot were you using? the potato one? download the woody netinst CD iso if you were - that should work fine. Woody is very nearly the stable version, and unless there is a reason you *really* need to go with debian/stable, woody is the best bet. More stuff supported anyway, although it still has 2.2.19 as the default kernel, theres a copy of 2.4.something there too.

I promise you, when you've played with apt - you will *not* want to use anything else.

Re:The Installer Baffles Me

[waldoj]

Which netboot were you using? the potato one? download the woody netinst CD iso if you were - that should work fine.

Um...I don't know. I just followed the download link. Ah, here it is: Potato. Odd, the Debian site just gives two links, as if they were mirrors, so I just picked one at random. It looks like the first one is Woody.

It's too bad that the installer doesn't have the sort of information as you have so kindly provided me with. (ie: This installer is "Potato," which installs a version of Debian from [I'm making this up] July of 2000. If this is significantly after July of 2000, you would do well to go to http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/ and get the newest version.) And then the website could give some sort of useful information as to the difference between a root (or is it a tuber?) and the main character from Toy Story.

-Waldo Jaquith

People that can't read.

[rawg]

The only people that think Debian is hard to install are people that can't read. The hardest part of it is the fdisk (easy to me). Other than that it is just hitting the enter key and your done.

Friendly to which users?

[mwood]

Anyone who utters the phrase "user-friendly" ought to be required to define the word "user". Most of the stuff I've dealt with which was called "user-friendly" was actively hostile to the kind of user who's been herding computers for a quarter of a century and expects them to just do as they're told with no back-talk. I'm always asking vendors to make their software less user-friendly and more usable.

Let's hope that this doesn't lead Debian in the wrong direction.

Re:Friendly to which users?

[Anonymous Coward]

"User" would mean the other 90% of the people in first-world countries that like things point-and-click, or something similar.

Re:Friendly to which users?

[Anonymous Coward]

>lead Debian

Good one. :)

Where is the Storm Installer?

[idonotexist]

We remember Storm Linux, right? While I do not use it today, I still find it the most user-friendly installer for Debian --- select usual preferences (keyboard, language, blah blah) and have the installed figure out the 'hardware stuff.'

With Storm long gone, would it not be legit to utilize the Storm installer for another product?

Re:Where is the Storm Installer?

[Gomer Pyle]

Agreed. Storm had the best Linux installer I've ever used. It was very accessible for beginners while also having a lot of advanced options. I always thought that Debian should have adopted it.

Caldera's got a good installer too

[DABANSHEE]

Its really a toss up between the 2, well installer wise anyway

Missed the point

[Anonymous Coward]

IMHO you missed the point. As Debian is not a commercial Distribution there is no reason why it can't have an installer for beginners and one for developers. If someone is interested in writing and maintaining a it, it will be there -- and the PGI installer is already a quite advanced example of an alternet installer.

The fatal trap of linux desktop developers

[Ilan Volow]

GUI's can allow end users to make better and more informed choices iff the person designing the GUI knows what the hell they are doing, which for most linux desktop developers is a pretty damned big "if". There seems to be an attitude of "If we simply make it into a GUI, it'll instantly be easy". If a set of GUI widgets are laid out in way that makes the relationship between the actions they perform extremely ambiguous, the GUI'ized interface will not be any better than the current command-line crap that proceeded it. In fact, it can be worse and mislead the user into making a very destructive choice that they thought that wouldn't be making. One of the biggest problems the linux interface design world is currently facing, as you pointed out, is the idea that "pretty == usable". All the anti-aliased text in the world won't ameliorate a menu selection with the caption "Save" that deletes everything on your hard drive.

I once talked to someone who designed a linux installer for a major linux distribution. This installer had many widgets laid out in a confusing and ambiguous manner, and in same cases widgets that are really meant for conveying one type of information were used to convey a totally different and wrong kind type information (for the widgets that were being used).

I mentioned some of these problems, and he didn't see what was the big deal. "You don't think it's pretty enough?" he asked me.

I like dselect

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one here who actually likes dselct?
People bash it for it's key commands, but they don't
seem to appreciate what it *does*. dselect is an incredibly useful and
powerful system maintenance tool.

there is a new installer

[Phork]

If they had done there research, they would know that there is a new installer for debian all written, it will be included with the next release of debian, woody, which should happen real soon now(tm).

Re:there is a new installer

[steveha]

it will be included with the next release of debian, woody, which should happen real soon now

Sorry to have to say this, but you are mistaken. Woody will ship with the same installer Debian already uses for Potato. The same one that most of the world seems to hate.

The next version after Woody should have an improved installer, very possibly based on the Progeny installer.

steveha

Homer Simpson shows you why this cannot be done

[Anonymous Coward]

Computer: "Press Any Key to continue."

Homer: "Press any key to continue. Well, where's the Any key? I see Esc, Ctrl, and PgUp, but no Any key! This complex computer hacking is making me thristy! I think i'll order a tab."

Homer presses Tab.

Homer: "Not now, the computer's starting up! Let's see. 'Vent Radioactive Gas?' N-O."

Homer types N-O.

Computer: "Venting prevents explosion."

Homer: "Well, give me a Y!"

Homer types Y. The computer beeps.

Homer: "Hey, I only need to type in Y! Hey Marge, I just tripled my productivity!"

The INSTALLER?!?

[rlangis]

I really don't understand what all of the hubbub is about the installer program. If it works, and gives you a workable system with a shell prompt, who cares how 'pretty' it is?

Granted, Debian's (current) installer isn't very user-friendly. However, it wasn't an issue for me, really. I've been through numerous RH installs (pre 6.2) and IIRC the installer wasn't much different from Debian's. RH6.2+ might have changed, but I've never used them, so I don't know.

But hell, I installed an OLD version of Debian - 2.0 - and apt'ed up to Sid without a hitch. The installer is only a very miniscule part of the picture. After the system is working, do you REALLY tell yourself, "Boy, that was a really froody installer," or do you amaze your friends and family with apt-get?

I love the current installer!

[_aa_]

http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/dists/woody/main/d isks-i386/3.0.21-2002-03-19/images-1.44/bf2.4/ -- 2 floppies, network install, 10 minutes (depending on your bandwidth).

If you ask me, it can't get much better than that.

Re:I love the current installer!

[Mike Buddha]

Journaling file system? Hardware detection? I think you can get qutie a bit better than that.

The poor geeks will . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

. . . take over your job, for which they are vastly overqualified. If someone is a "guru" of some sort of "esoteric-knowledge", that probably means they are smart in other ways as well.

They need to use RH's install

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian needs to switch to RPM's and use the RH install (or even the Mandrake one). Now that we have apt for RPMS there's no benefit to using the dbpkg format.

Anyway, mod this down as flame bait. I don't mean it as such but package format is as much a religious issue as distro or editors or anything else so there's no hope of having a resionable discussion on it.

Re:They need to use RH's install

[drumsetdrummer]

Actually, to the contrary there are lots of reasons why dpkg is still superior to rpm:

1. dpkg has configuration options that, when needed, will prompt the user and ask how he/she would like the package to behave. With RPM, you don't have that option.
2. dpkg and apt on Debian work very nicely together to provide more official packages than any other distrobution (3,900+ on Potato). Sure, you can type 'up2date --nox packageName' and get RH to install a package with dependencies taken care of, but only the relatively few packages that RH officially includes in their distro. And if you download RPMs from contrib.redhat.com you're really taking your chances since those are packages uploaded by Joe Shmoe and not officially support or tested by RH.
3. With up2date, you're also stuck using the RHN. If you want to use it for more than one machine you either have to pay RH or go to their website each time and switch to another machine. With Debian, you can apt-get update|install|upgrade on however many machines you want, using whatever mirror you want from an endless list. Now there's nothing wrong with RH charging for this. They are a company and they have to make money. Plenty of other companies would save a lot of money if they bought a RH CD install kit, wiped Windows off their servers and purchased RHN licenses for all the boxes. It's just that with Debian, they wouldn't have to go through that hassle.
4. If you want to upgrade your whole entire system to the next Debian release, all you do is edit your /etc/apt/sources.list file to grab the new distro (i.e.: change instances of 'potato' to 'woody'), then type 'apt-get update;apt-get upgrade'. After it downloads, installs and configures your new packages... you have the latest version. And you dont' even have to reboot unless you separately upgrade the kernel (and want to use it).

Re:They need to use RH's install

[Anonymous Coward]

> dpkg and apt on Debian work very nicely together to provide more official packages than any other distrobution (3,900+ on Potato).

dpkg and apt have nothing to do with this; you're talking about the efforts of the Debian developer community.

A sad fact.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sad as it may seem for some people Linux Developers are no longer the same people as Linux Users.

If this is true, then Linux will start faltering soon. One of the reasons that open source is so good is that generally its developers are its users. If there's a bug in it or something they don't like, it gets fixed quickly. Also, advice from users with no knowledge of HCI can often be more harmful than ignoring users altogether.

On the other hand you had some good and valid points: this does eventually need to be tested by the target audience, newbies. Feedback on what actually works, regardless of HCI theory, is also essential. However, eschewing the developers from the process will only alienate them and make the software worse, not better. I might also add that it probably helps the developer understand and relate to the user if the developer is a user.

Users are the ones that matter here.

Yes, but remember, with (good) open source, the developers are users too.

Install

[Erwos]

A story: Back way back when Debian was still using a 2.0.36 kernel (they did finally move to 2.2, right? ;) ), and I was a Linux virgin, my family decided they wanted to have all the networked computers in the house on the net at once. We were using an absolutely horrible piece of software called WinGate, may it die a thousand deaths, to do that and it just wasn't very satisfying. More to the point, I couldn't play Half-Life over it. Fortunately, we had a spare 486 lying around. My dad mentioned he heard of something called Linux that could do what WinGate was(n't) doing, so I downloaded some Debian install floppy disks. I was somewhat computer-savvy, so I wasn't terribly upset at having to manually specify what was in my computer during the install, or play with partitions - I mean, that stuff you've gotta do in Windows, so what's the big deal about doing it with a console interface? It installed and worked fine _the first time_. I didn't have X11 (that didn't really fit on the floppies), but I had been fine with DOS, so command lines were fine. I will grant you that I probably knew more about computers than the average joe at that point in time, but I really think that reasonably intelligent person who knows what's in their computer could install Debian with no problems back then. It's probably more true nowadays. And, yes, I did make it into a router with a simple kernel compile and some patches. :) My GPA went straight to hell after that, too much Counter-Strike... -Erwos

This is so true . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at Mac OS X: the install process consists of clicking "OK" about eight times.

You know what I'd like to see? A CD that you pop into a computer, boot the computer up, the CD comes up with a screen saying "Hi, do you want to install Linux on this computer (y/n)?" and when the user clicks (or presses, or whatever) "yes", it installs Linux.

That's it. No partition muddling. No tricky hardware questions. One question and you're done. Just do it.

I realize that Linux has a long way to go before it gets there, and it's hard to anticipate and handle every possible thing that might go wrong. But can you imagine having a Linux distro like this? Automatically resizing existing partitions, installing common software and setting up a boot loader to load Linux and whatever other OSes are on the machine? It can be done, it's just going to take a lot of work.

Re:This is so true . . .

[CAIMLAS]

Which then, subsequently, hoses their 33G of NTFS/FAT32 pron, divx, and MP3s.

Re:This is so true . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Which then, subsequently, hoses their 33G of NTFS/FAT32 pron, divx, and MP3s.

Which is why we need to focus not just on pretty GUI enhancements but other things that help smooth the user experience. It *is* possible to resize partitions without losing data. If the user has filled up their hard drive and there's not enough space to repartition for Linux, the software needs to tell them so and explain how to free up some space (and the consequences of freeing up that space). Like I said, it's really hard to anticipate anything, but having an install that would do everything automatically as long as everything was reasonably okay (enough free hard drive space, CPU not on fire, etc) would go a long ways towards making Linux more user-friendly.

Use Libranet if debian is not for you!

[high]

Everyone is complaining about that Debians installer is to hard. But there has been several attempts on creating easy installers for Debian such as Stormix, Corel, and Progeny. Now there is Xendros (former Corel) and Libranet. Libranet is an uptodate debian with an easy installer.

If you want them to continue and improve there work, support them!

Journalling FS

[ttfkam]

While we're on the topic of improving Debian's installer, the only thing (and I do honestly mean the *only* reason) that kept me from installing it this weekend was the fact that there is no option for a journalled filesystem "out of the box." I don't care if it's ext3, JFS, XFS, ReiserFS, or whatever. And no, installing ext2 on one of two large partitions, placing the OS on the ext2 partition, recompiling the kernel, formatting the other partition with a journalled filesystem, moving all of the info from one partition to the other, editing GRUB's config, etc. does not count as "Debian supports journalling filesystems already."

If people are serious about making Debian userfriendly, we need to avoid things like this after a power outage (or bumped powercord):

Enter root password to run fsck:
%

Now what? I know, I'm sure many of you know, but what's a casual user to think of this? Add to this the fact that if they run fsck without the correct parameter, they'll be answering yes/no questions until they decide that it just isn't worth it and they install a different distribution or (quite likely) give up on Linux altogether and grab that Win2K CD.

I would love to help out here, but I have no real experience with Debian and its installer. I have some free time though and a programming background; If someone wants some help, reply to this post with some project info.

My $0.02

I installed Woody with ext3

[drumsetdrummer]

So I must ask... 'ta heck are you talking about?!

You just need to grab the bf-something Woody install. It's the one with the 2.4.18 kernel. During the partitioning part of the install you select Linux extended. Then when configuring each partition, the installation asks you if you want it to be ext2 or ext3. Just select ext3. It's really that simple.

RE: Offtopic

[extrasolar]

I almost kick myself everytime I read one of these "re-inventing the wheel with open source" tidbits. I'm not sure what your experience is but it doesn't sound like you have a foot in the free software community.

Because it is a community and the community isn't hiring people from Universities with CS degrees, rather within the community people are learning to code. They are getting experience. Some of us are rather new to coding so you will see "Hello World" re-implemented thousands of times. You'll see hundreds of the most routine shell scripts. And you'll see dozens of IRC clients all from a different code base. Why?

Its part of the fun of computing. Honestly, it is less fun (IMO) to start from someone else's program than from starting from scratch--especially when someone else's program already has all the features you want. The beginning stages of a software project are probably the most exciting.

Of course there are other things. Like it is more difficult to grok a large code base than a smaller one. And sometimes more experienced coders pull tricks that newbies don't quite grok yet--so decide to use more simpler and apparent methods.

Free Software isn't going away and I think you're going to see a lot more of this. Programmers going through different stages of experience and writing software that demonstrates different levels of skill.

One thing I've noticed is that software is becomming more and more complex. We may see what I call generational programming. Basically, instead of one programmer understanding a code base or even an entire community understanding a code base we may get to the point where several generations are needed to understand and contribute to a code base (or it may be a conveniant excuse for the TUNES project :).

Why I use an RPM-based distribution

[Isaac-Lew]

I've been using UNIX & Linux for about 4 years now, and I'm often asked why I still use Red Hat instead of Debian or Slackware. Here's why:

• Familiarity with RH (yes, it was the first distro I used, and I have tried others)
• Consistency between work & home (RH is the only distro allowed on the servers, and I like being able to keep more-or-less the same setup between home & work)
• There are LOTS of software packages in rpm format, and it's not difficult to build your own rpm package (either with a source rpm, or from a tarball)- as for the dep problem, you would still need the same dependencies on another distribution so IMO that arguement is invalid
• There are loads of documentation for both Red Hat and rpm in general (www.redhat.com & www.rpm.org are good sites for looking things up - as the website for a linux-related channel states: "You can lead an Red Hat user to documentation, but you can't make him/her read" or words to that effect)
• Personally, I don't like the attitude of a lot of Debian users, they really turned me off of even wanting to try Debian anymore (constantly bashing other distros while ignoring the faults in your own is *not* good advocacy)

You do know that a lot of rpm-based distros have good tools that are under the GPL or other open licenses...maybe if Debian would consider using these or similar tools I'd think about giving it a try again at home...after all, there is apt for rpm now, so maybe there is hope that the different distros could play nicer with each other :).

Re: Offtopic

[brunes69]

I agree with what you're saying, and I understand fully that the Open Source community is a dynamic one that is largely based both on developers scratching an itch, and developers learning new skills. But the number of large-scale community driven projects that are there to serve a specific goal are growing rapidly. Look at OpenOffice, Mozilla, KOffice, Evolution, Apache for examples. All of these are fairly large, complex pieces of software. While some might have initially started out scratching an itch, they are now vital pieces of software we all depend on.

These are the kinds of projects that can and should benefit the most from code reuse and collaboration, but in my experience utilize it the least. Take my example about MSOffice filters. Or the fact that the Mozilla project wrote a whole new GUI system when several excellent cross platform toolkits already existed.

Wrong, wrong, WRONG!

[Jagasian]

You missed the point.

Ask users what they want, because they will use the installer for installing the OS.

Ask developers what they want, because they will be writing code, modules, extensions, and keeping the installer up-to-date with newer hardware. If you don't take developers past, present, and future into consideration, then you will end up with an installer that noone wants to maintain, extend, tweak, polish, etc... In addition, hardware developers should also be consulted, because they will be making the hardware that is to be autodetected and configured. Companies that support Linux by providing specs, drivers, and such, should be companies whose hardware is correctly autodetected and autoconfigured by the installer.

Ignoring developers would be one of the most ignorant and just plain stupid things that you could do when designing a Linux installer. My point is that, in fact, the developers will be dealing with the installer far more than the users because they will be writing code or fabricating hardware, all of which must correctly and easily integrate with the installer.

Furhermore, asking users should mean asking and supporting different types of users: Joe Six-pack users, power users, and most importantly, system administrators and system integrators. How many MS Windows users installed their copy of windows? Yeah, very little, so why ask Joe Six-pack what he wants when he most likely won't ever install an OS? Its more important to ask the target groups that will be installing operating systems: OEMs (aka system integrators), system administrators, and power users.

Having an installer that can be used by any idiot off the street might seem like a good idea, but you will be ignoring your target audience.

Truely, for Linux to "make it on the desktop", requires that OEMs start shipping PDAs, laptops, desktop PCs, and workstations with Linux on them. Otherwise, you will be making a Linux-for-Dummies installer for a group of people who will never use it. You want Linux to end up on more desktops? Ask Dell, Compaq, and HP what they want from a Debian Linux installer. Also, note that an automated patch application utility such as apt-get makes support oh so much easier, as long as it is setup to run at 2AM every night or something like that. OEMs should think about that. No more workstations 3 service packs behind means far fewer people with rooted web servers, desktops, etc... (ala Code Red and Nimda).

Finally, some flamebait, but it must be said: Most HCI or CHI people are the wrost types of Software Engineers and Computer Scientists... even worse than those AI guys (most of whom don't even understand the basic limitations of formal, i.e. computational systems: incompleteness, undecidability, diagnalization). I mean, most things that the HCI research guys find out is common sense, and when its not, its most likely misleading, "dumb down the world" advice, like the parent post. Users can mean developers in one situation (OS installers, if OEM system integrators and sys-admins are considered developers) and other times it can mean Joe-sixpack (Web Browsers, IM, Media Players). But not so if you ask the HCI croud... to them, everything should be dumbed down. Any retard should be able to carry out any task. I am still waiting for the HCI croud to start writing papers on making open heart surgery more user-friendly and easier to carry out by Joe-sixpack. We have all seen what happens when you dumb down system administration. You dumb down the security of the internet. I mean, any idiot can admin a server right? Microsoft preaches so, but is it a good idea?

Choice, options, control... they should all be taken away from the user, no matter who that user is. For according to HCI types, we should pander to the lowest common denominator: Joe sixpack and Soccer Mom. They LOVE installing operating systems. Its part of or at least could and should be part of their everyday life.

While the HCI research community has a few nice apples, most are bad apples that just couldn't cut it in their Computational Theory 101 class or Algorithms 101 class. So they spend their entire life writing papers on common sense topics and idiotic topics. Whoever gives them funding is wasting their money.

Re:Wrong, wrong, WRONG!

[Tryfen]

I'll answer you in stages. Bare with me ... :-)

Q: What does the developer have to do with a person installing the OS? A: Nothing. The installee couldn't care less about the underlying principles of the installer. As you say, most people don't install Windows, yet anyone can. It's impossible to install Windows and seriously mess it up. When Linux allows a pleb to fiddle with the most intimate options to a dangerous extreme it's allowing itself to be broken. Sure, make an installer capable for those who want to do dangerous things - but make the basic installer just have to click "Go" and let it do its business.
A developer might want to assign specific IRQs to certain cards - your average pleb doesn't even know what an IRQ is.

Truely for Linux to be on the Desktop, yup, has to come preinstalled. But if it's not usable people will ditch it. Linux without the GUI is stable, fast and does loads of cool things. But how many people want to remember to type "crypticcommand myFile -0 -ee" as opposed to having a visual representation? How many people want to have to remember a different cut/copy/paste metric for each program as opposed to consistency?

You say (and, yeah I'm biting, sue me!) that HCI is common sence. Problem is, if common sence is so common - why dont' more people have it? It's common sence not to drink and drive, it's common sence not to delete system files. I know otherwise intelligent people who do both.
If we could design humans, it might be possible to make heart surgery easier (multiple hearts each in their own easily openable cage, nice modular design :-) but we can't design or even teach humans - we can design and teach computers.

HCI doesn't say take choice away from all users. It says stop all users making mistakes. An administrator should be able to delete crucial system files that a pleb shouldn't be let anywhere near.
HCI is about giving the apropriate choice to the appropriate user.

Sorry for the spelling etc, in a rush.
T

Progeny Installer

[Loranze-Da-Playa]

What ever happened to the very effective Progeny installer ? Like the post above says, it has very good hardware detection and a useful graphical user interface. The last I heard about that installer, it was said that it would be absorbed into the main debian distribution. Does anyone know what has happened to it ?

Oh yeah?

[Mr.Mustard]

I use debian on a Compaq Contura Aero 4/33C (33MHz 486SX) with 8MB of RAM and a 150MB hard drive. Took me several days to install. I don't use X for disk space and performance reasons. Basically it serves as a very small terminal for my desk.

No real problems, though, other than the fact that it takes forever to load dselect.

Use PicoGUI

[Anonymous Coward]

For the install process, XWindows is overkill. Use Picogui instead - it is designed to run on everything, it is really cool looking, and should run lighter than an X installer.

Conectiva's Modular Instaler

[rsd]

Why not using Conectiva Linux's Modular Instaler (MI) ? http://distro.conectiva.com.br

Conectiva has one of the best GPL instalers.
It is:
- modular, so you can easily create new modules,
- light (the ncurses version needs less than 8MB of RAM)
- apt centric, it should be really easy to adapt it to use deb instead of
rpm. and apt can be the hook here.

Eeeeewwwww.

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually had to remove the cover from a box once to find out what kind of NIC it had. The same applies to the videocard and monitor I have.

Fuck that!

Re: Offtopic

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the point is, you should try to find some well documented free code to possibly use in your project before attempting something that has already been done. A good coder uses resourcefulness as well as innovation to produce excellent work. Remember, code can be taken out or trimmed down to get better results.

Re:Are all distros for beginners?-autodetect

[Anonymous Coward]

"And even experts shouldn't have to do stupid things like manually set up network cards when they can be easily auto-detected. "

True, however one shouldn't forget a windows lesson.
You know the one were it auto-detects a piece of hardware. Says it's a particular brand which you know is untrue. Spend the rest of the day fighting with windows trying to convince it otherwise. Do we want to bring that kind of "auto-detect" to Linux?

Re:Misunderstanding-Bad aim.

[Anonymous Coward]

" The thing about Debian vs. Red Hat is that Debian's package-management KICKS ASS. "

So isn't this more the reason to fix RPM than it is to "fix" Debian's installer?

Why I use an RPM-based distribution-dependencies

[Anonymous Coward]

"as for the dep problem, you would still need the same dependencies on another distribution so IMO that arguement is invalid"

The difference between dependencies and Debian vs RPM and others is who handles the dependencies. You or the computer? IMHO I'd rather have the computer handle it with the possability for me to overide were needed.

Multiplatform serial terminal install

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian is one of the few distros that is nearly so portable and consistent as NetBSD (my other favorite distro).

Remember, some of us (particularly Alpha and SPARC users) do _NOT_ have big, nice X and/or VGA graphics hardware. We use DEC VT and WYSE terminals on our servers and even some of our workstations ;-)

Anything that would detract from the consistent multiplatform installer to appease the x86 PC and PPC Mac users would cause me (and other Alpha/SPARC developers) to switch to NetBSD full-time.

PA

Please don't tell this to the moslems

[Taco Cowboy]

I lives in a country where the moslems are majority, and they will kill you if you utter anything close to "piggy".

I am afraid http://hackers.progeny.com/pgi/ may not be kosher for the moslems.

To the moslems, Osama Bin Laden is kosher, but "piggy" is not.

Blowing up others is kosher to the moslems, but when others retaliate, it's not.

Re:Why I NEVER EVER use an RPM-based distribution

[Anonymous Coward]

I started off with redhat. I nearly gave up linux altogether because of it. Now I use exclusivley slackware & bsd. heres why:

1) unfamiliarity. redhat has things laid out like no other distribution so despite me rtfm'ing like mad I couldn't learn anything about it.

2) inconsistancy between work & home. Due to the excessive security problems my work won't touch redhat with a bargepole.

3)There is lots of software as RPM packages. unfortunately netcat.rpm was the only one that ever worked due to dependancy problems. Now I use the source, because dependancies are listed in the README and once you install those (from source) you do NOT get any problems.

4)Utter Shit Documentation. Net-HOWTO says look in /etc/ppp. Redhat has conf files in /etc/sysconfig/networks/local/hidden/special/ut ter-stupid-deep/path/can/u/find/it/yet?/ppp. need i say more.

5) I'll agree with your bit about debian users. They do seem a bit dauntingly like a cult from the outside :) but then i thought the same about BSD and its by far the best server O.S. I've ever used.

Why does every distro want newbies?

[penguinman79]

It seems that, in the push for "Linux on the desktop", everyone assumes that every distribution should be aimed at the "newbie" Linux user. From my perspective, this is the wrong approach.

The strength of the distribution approach is that each can be a tool that is used in different situations. I can use Mandrake or RedHat for my desktop and Slack or Debian for my servers. That puts the responsibility for user friendliness on people who WANT to specialize in it, while putting the responsibility for speed/performance/stability/etc on those who want to deal with those issues.

It's all a matter of what the developers decide is important to their retaining user base. After all, if there's one thing we should learn from Microsoft, it's that it's very difficult to be all things to all people, and a product that tries to do everything does very little well. That's no way to win popularity.

I'll use the age-old cliche of my toolbox. I know that to tighten a bolt, I use a wrench. I know that I need a hammer to handle a nail. In the same respect, I know that Mandrake and RedHat have put together very newbie-friendly distributions. On the other hand, I know that if I need a minimalist or tightly controlled install, I know that I can turn to Debian or Slackware.

I guess all I'm saying is that it's a very difficult thing to try to go from expert-oriented to newbie-oriented, and it's not necessarily a step that SHOULD be taken in all regards. Consider your user base and type of tool they consider your product to be, whether you'll lose the ability to use it for that purpose (and therefore lose that user base), and whether the risk and sacrifice is really a good idea overall. Consider that there is a lot of time and money ahead of you in the new market you'll be joining, and that you'll be sacrificing all of the time you've already spent getting to where you are in the market you're now leaving.

Maybe the secret to world domination is diversification. Windows' approach is unification, which gives them an AWEFUL large set of tasks to master in a single product. Things that you and I know should never really go together - like solitaire on a router. Pick a market and dominate it. If the distributions all pick different markets and dominate them, then the umbrella - Linux - will dominate all markets.

Jo shmoe user

[Sleeper Service]

Hmmm. I think that the average user has a tendency to want to browse to see what is available, which is best served by a dselect-like program. For people wanting to set up server boxes or boxes for a particular task (CPU farms, storage servers, etc), your approach is probably preferable, though.

My point is that Jo Shmoe and Linux Guru are two different people. There are huge numbers of window managers to choose from, to suit different kinds of user - why can't there be different levels of package manager?

A pox on both your houses!

[ttfkam]

I have been patient. I have been persistent. I come bearing the news to Debian webmasters everywhere that the "bf-something Woody install" is not obvious. Not only in name obscurity when a Debian newbie would only know to look for 2.2 or 3.0 disc images, but also in placement on the website.

I have gone searching in vain for this bf-something install. I have looked in all of the obvious places on the website under such topics as "Getting Debian," "Debian on CD," and ""Download with FTP." This is bullshit. If this is everyone's definition of publically available, I must have missed that day of class. I even download some of those potentially nifty netinstall CD images in the hopes that they simply weren't labelled correctly with the magical bf- prefix.

Believe me, I have gone through a lot more effort than most casual visitors to the Debian site would have gone through. Unfortunately this is one area that Debian could learn from RedHat, Mandrake, SuSe, et al in that the others provide an iso image, you download it, you burn it, and off you go. If the newer install with the updated kernel works so well, why hasn't the old installer been mothballed? Why would the old installer be offered? If the new installer has problems that preclude its replacement of the old installer, then the appropriate answer to my previous post would have been "they're working on it and it should be ready when 3.0 is released."

By all means, prove me wrong. By all means, show me an obvious link that demonstrates me to be a dullard who cannot read a web page. I am not above humility. Otherwise I will assume that a clean and complete Debian install is bullshit, must first be excavated by a Debian veteran who knows how to find it, and/or is of no use to the general public. Debian may be a great distribution, but that's pointless if most people can't install easily without sacrificing popular features (like journalled filesystems) or hunting through mailing list archives without really knowing for what they search.