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Progeny Announces Graphical Installer for Debian Woody

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the gui-but-not-sticky dept.

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.

7 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/

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    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: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.
  6. 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.

  7. 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.