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Progeny Announces Graphical Installer for Debian Woody

jdaily writes "In light of recent negative reviews of Debian in which the installer was roundly criticized, this announcement may have particular timeliness and relevance: Progeny has made available an i386 Debian 3.0 (woody) installer image based on PGI, the Progeny Graphical Installer. This is available at Progeny's free software archive." I've installed Debian so many times that I've just learned to cope with the installer, but this is a much needed boost.

16 of 226 comments (clear)

  1. Re:screenshots? by humboldt · · Score: 4, Informative

    Try these.

  2. ScreenShots by Rubbersoul · · Score: 5, Informative

    For those that are interested here are screenshots of PGI v0.9.6

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

    --
    man .sig
    No manual entry for .sig.
  3. Re:The default debian installer is intimidating by AntiFreeze · · Score: 5, Informative
    Yeah, Debian can be like that. You either know exactly which packages you want, or you grab at random, or use something like tasksel to start you off. Tasksel is actually very useful, although sometimes it will install more than you want. Of course, that's better than not installing enough.

    In addition, the guys in #debian on irc.debian.org (once the openprojects.net server, who knows what the deal is now with the fundraising fiasco) are extremely helpful if you're trying to figure things out, lost, or just tinkering around.

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    "Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller

  4. Clickable link by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    A clickable version of the above link. (Posting as a coward since I am no karma whore.)

  5. Re:woody? by Ravenn · · Score: 2, Informative

    Heh. Dork.

    If you look at the history of Debian releases, you may just see the sequence:

    1.1 - Buzz
    1.2 - Rex
    1.3 - Bo
    2.0 - Hamm
    2.1 - Slink
    2.2 - Potato
    3.0+ - Woody
    Testing - Sarge
    Unstable - Sid

    But I bet that someone will still have to explain it more to some...

    Ravenn
    --
    Of all the things you can accomplish by screwing up your face and swearing into a dark room, sleep is not one of them.
  6. Re:Why now? by reynaert · · Score: 5, Informative
    The Progeny installer has three major problems:
    • It doesn't work on most of the architectures supported by Debian (does it even work on anything but i386?)
    • It is geared toward CD installs, its support for network installs is just not good enough.
    • It's too much work to make a installer. The Debian people hope to have a installable version of testing available at all times, but that's just too much work with PGI.
  7. Re:Why now? by Turmio · · Score: 3, Informative

    Perhaps because PGI only works with i386 (afaik?) But Debian/unstable is being developed for 13 different Linux-based architectures plus 4 non-linux (hurd, *bsd). shiny-multimedia-super-douper-developed-for-pc-use rs junk just doesn't work there. That's why you have to build a modular installer engine from scratch so you can choose graphical back-end if your platform supports it or you want in in the first place. I don't want a graphical installation even for my monster AthlonXP box.

    And you always have the right to stop bitching and use something else if you don't like the way Debian is doing things. Try it sometime. Thank you very much.

  8. Re:Plese don't ever make this the default by Fluffy+the+Cat · · Score: 5, Informative

    Does the graphical frontend actually offer any significant additions over the text one?

    Hardware autodetection. Fewer questions asked. It's not just a graphical version of the standard Debian install, it's something a great deal closer to the Red Hat or Mandrake installers.

    Debian will always have a text installer available, because it supports platforms which may not have graphical capabilities. Doing a graphical install over a serial console is, uhm, tricky.

  9. Re:Here we go ... by dex@ruunat · · Score: 2, Informative

    And how many companies do you know that are running Debian as their Linux distribution of choice?

    You might want to check out http://www.debian.org/users/.

  10. Re:cross-platform? by GrnyS · · Score: 2, Informative

    Eh? Refusing?

    Last I checked, PGI was in stable, testing and unstable. (But then, last I checked PGI wasn't finished yet, either.)

  11. Re:Debian ain't for n00bz. Get over it. by JohnFluxx · · Score: 2, Informative

    Trouble with suse is its proprietry software - some of us switched to linux to get away from all of that.

  12. More information... by jdaily · · Score: 5, Informative

    PGI does support ia64 as well as i386, and developers outside of Progeny are working on powerpc. The design is modular, to minimize the work required to make it functional on other architectures (although "minimize" should not imply that it's easy).

    We hope to have ia64 CDs available shortly, but given the relative market shares of the two platforms, we wanted to make the i386 images available without waiting for ia64.

    Other recent developments at Progeny include the release of Discover 2.0, a cross-platform extensible hardware identification library and tool; Progeny Graphical Installer (PGI) 1.0, which contrary to its name is properly an installer creation system; and the announcement of Platform Services, a subscription service that makes it easier for companies to develop and maintain Linux-powered products and services.

  13. Re:Here we go ... by Ost99 · · Score: 2, Informative
    Well from this old slashdot article, it seems like some big companies use it.

    And yes, I do work and we use debian on some of our production servers and all of our development servers.

    Others seem to like it as well:
    "I use a distribution called Debian"
    "what really sold me on it was its phenomenal bug database"
    -- Neal Stephenson
    You could also check out www.debian.org/users

    And by the way, NASA uses Debian for their Aeroshark and Ziti clusters. They have put Debian in space as well, but the link seems to be rotten...

    - Ost
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  14. Re:Debian ain't for n00bz. Get over it. by Phil+Hands · · Score: 3, Informative

    If you switch from 'doze to SuSE, then you're jumping out of the frying pan, into a slightly overheated bath, with someone else controling the temperature.

    YaST, and hence SuSE as a whole, is non-free software. Of course Red Hat is drifting that way with their silly trademark games, so I wouldn't recomend them either.

    You may say that YaST is almost free, but licenses are more important than many people think. After all, we're not all talking about *BSD taking over from 'doze are we.

    Why opt for SuSE's "license-light", when you could give up the non-free license habit entirely?

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    Debian: GNU/Linux done the Linux way
  15. Re:I love debians installer by CableModemSniper · · Score: 2, Informative

    Have you tried apt yet? Seems like thats exactly in the middle. Just get a base system up and running and then apt-get anything else you need.

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    Why not fork?
  16. Re:I love debians installer by Xibby · · Score: 3, Informative

    dd? Hmm...sure...that would work...

    But I perfer installing one system, getting all the packages I want selected and installed, then on the second system, get base installed. (Getting a Debian system with just the Debian base [base being Linux system up and running and ready for you to use apt-get/dselect/etc.] then, on the system that's in the finished state:

    dpkg --get-selections >> zibbys.selections

    Transfer zibbys.selections to base system, then run:
    dpkg --set-selections zibbys.selections
    apt-get dsist-upgrade

    And off goes the wonderful tool called apt, downloading all my selections.

    Dumping your selections is a great way to do backups on a budget too. Just back up configs, /home, /usr/local, and other custom areas, and a selections file. If you need to recover, install base, add selections, install, restore /etc/, /home/, /usr/local...

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    I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.