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.

Comments

They should have done this a long time ago

[pvera]

It drives me crazy that with the incredible talent behind Debian the install process is such a pain. Installing Suse, Mandrake and RH are not harder to install than installing Windows XP or OS X. Installing freeBSD is confusing until you find a few hours after you think you mastered sysinstall a kind soul at a bsd chatroom tells you to use the ports instead.

Installing Debian (or Gentoo) is just too damn confusing. I admire what Debian and Gentoo are aiming for, but they need to come up with a no-hassle installer.

Re:They should have done this a long time ago

[psavo]

What I see you argueing is that the debian installer is purposefully left hard to use because it helps to keep the less skilled from using debian.

Well if you see that, then your vision is clearly better than mine, because I didn't say such thing. All I said that debian installer is not aimed at n00bs. It doesn't mean that it was done so on purpouse.

Frankly, improving installer that is already fully functional and is used for approx 15min out of 3-4 years of uptime, seems a bit ridiculous to me. If you want to do it, then go ahead, this is a free world, but demanding people doing this for free, is a bit fat for me.

Re:I love debians installer

[AntiFreeze]

That's exactly how I feel. On the other hand, I know many people who want to use Debian for that same flexibility later on (apt-getting packages at a later stage) but have problems with the initial install and getting the right set of starter packages on the machine.

I, for one, will stick with the ncurses generic Debian install, for it is what I use and like, but I will also welcome the graphical installer, for it will be quite helpful to other people and bring more people over to use Debian who were initially scared away by the hardcore install.

In other words, I don't see this as a matter of improving the install, but simply making it more readily available to those for whom the install was previously too complicated for. This is a good thing.

[I apologize for any incoherence in the previous statements, I'm running on no sleep... again.]

Plese don't ever make this the default

[Psiren]

I fail to see why this is any better than the standard text installation. Worse, it requires a graphical display, so you then enter the fb/X11 compatability issues. Whats wrong with a text installer? You're only going to be looking at it for say, an hour at the very most, right?

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

Re:Plese don't ever make this the default

[Wolfier]

Don't make it a default - make "ask a questin" a default - just let me choose between the text and the GUI installer right at the beginning and I'll happily abandon the text interface, thanks.

If they accomplish the same thing so what if the GUI is slow and clumsy. A lot of people is only going to do it once. Why spend anytime learning just how to use the installer? I'd rather spend time learning something I'll do more than once.

"Zero learning curve, abysmal usability / speed" summarizes the behavior of most GUI. If I only have to do it one time the Zero learning curve is going to make up for the usability / speed and then some.

I'd like to see a better text-based installer

[vrt3]

Making the installer graphical in itself doesn't make any difference towards ease of use. Hardware detection and less technical questions do, but that can be done in a text-based installer as well, with the added bonus that you don't need X just for the install.

I haven't had any problems with the Debian installer , but I can understand it can be daunting to a newbie. Allthough I've seen Debian installations done by people not too acquainted with Linux (but they did have experience with other OSes (sp?)).

Anyway, I'm confident the Debian developers will come up with a decent installer by the time Sarge is promoted to stable.