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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.
The first time I went to install Debian it was pretty intimidating with dozens of packages all over the place I didn't know what the hell was going on so I decided to go back to good ol' RedHat 6.2. Trusty and reliable I always say!
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
This installer has been available to the Debian developers for how long? 2 years? It's unbelievable that they haven't been using it earlier. No, they had to write it from scratch, and it is still not finished.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
... will I need a mouse to install my system ?
Fair enough it might be intimidating to a 'new' user, but its the only installer ive ever used that offers me the flexibility i need. Ive used mandrake, SuSE, lycoris, corel and red hat and with any of those distributions it is impossible to do something that the devlopers didnt think of in advance. Debians installer lets you configure your system in as much detail as you want, and install from a large variety of mediums (various network, physical etc). All in all, id be suprised to see anyone improve it, making it graphical is just eye candy, you cant provide anything 'extra', you just make it more pleasing to the eye.
Try these.
For those that are interested here are screenshots of PGI v0.9.6
http://hackers.progeny.com/pgi/screenshots/
man
No manual entry for
network.img from mandrake. This boot disk allows you to install from the internet WITH A GRAPHICAL installer and USES UPTO DATE SOFTWARE. Im using it right now, and Ive never looked back.
A clickable version of the above link. (Posting as a coward since I am no karma whore.)
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.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
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...
RavennOf all the things you can accomplish by screwing up your face and swearing into a dark room, sleep is not one of them.
If Debian remains true to it's high standards, no graphical installer will make it into a stable distribution unless it works for every platform supported by Debian.
So, sure, go ahead, use the Progeny one... but do make it work on (Ultra)Sparc, Alpha, Amiga, Atari ST, PA/RISC, S390, whatever... not so easy, is it?
Guys, remember, there's more to Linux than just x86!
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?
(Disclaimer: it's been over a year since I did my Debian install, and my memory is somewhat fuzzy).
The first part of a Debian install, where you make disk partitions, set the hostname etc. is similar enough to a RedHat text-mode install (of which I've done several) that it didn't faze me. I don't think that part of the Debian install is difficult at all.
The difficult part is the second stage of the installation: selecting packages with tasksel/dselect. I took one look at it and just hit "quit". That gave me a base install, with nothing else. However, there's more than one way to skin a cat: I used apt-cdrom/apt-get to install all the rest of the stuff I wanted.
I'm not saying that Joe Average would/should be happy with apt-get from the command line; I'm saying that it's dead easy for someone with only a small amount of Unix/Linux experience to use, and it's much easier than dselect. It's perfectly possible to install Debian without wrestling with dselect.
-Stephen
The problem with installers is that by the time people understand the system enough to work out what the installer is asking for they are already familiar enough with the install process not to care.
Installers are *always* the first thing that people meet in a distribution. Doesn't matter how similar the underlying OS is to other products, if the installer appears to be unfriendly or asks questions that people don't understand they aren't going to get a lot further.
I found this when I moved from RedHat to Debian, it took me a few goes to work out what exactly the installation process was asking for. I would only recommend Debian to people who really understand both linux and their hardware, anyone else would just be put off before they even got the distribution up and running.
People can argue about why one distribution is 'better' than another, but one of RedHat's strengths is that it is a pretty-much automated install and the bits that require the user to tell the install process ask questions that the user can understand.
Is there any way to just simply mix and match different disks? I'm wondering if you could install the PGI-enabled first CD, then when tasksel or whatever prompts you for additional CDs, use the other 6 in the set. I get the impression you can't, as the Progeny site talks about creating your own installer CDs (plural, not singular).
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
That's what you pay distributors for, y'know? Honestly, if you wanna switch from 'doze to Linux, you'll best be of on a money-making distro (or give that money to the Linux geek-friend for him setting up a system for you). /. - seems from the measily 30% of slashdotters using Linux regularly, 90% use RH with no knowlege of what's going on in the rest of the *nix world.
Yet I don't get the heavy RH bias on
Anyway, you want a graphic installer? I recommend SuSE and for good reasons too.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Why is everybody whining about the disadvantages with a graphical installer?
Ok, so the text-installer *works*, but that's just bearly. You will have to work a lot of things out by yourself, specially when it comes to hardware detection.
As it is today, it seems like Debian is only for people with an already extended knowledge about Linux, and these people wants to keep the difficult ancient text-only installer to "keep the newbies away" from Debian, and make it a distro for the experts.
This is not the right way. Linux should be for *everybody*, not just those who can understand the way-too-difficuly installer.
The best would of course be to have both at graphical installer AND the text-only installer. Then the hardcore Debian users could still use the text-only installer since they seem to like it so much, and we mortals could use the nice GUI installer. Then both partys would be happy.
Why isn't it so already?
I know you can still do everything by the command line but how often people actualy do that as oposed to using the fast and dirty gui
Many of us running RedHat Linux on a server with only console access. All the non-developmental servers I use or have used, had the X packages and anything related to them removed.
I dont think anyone will disagree with the fact that RPM has the worst dependincies detection ever
If that's your main technical criticism of RedHat's distribution, then you might want to check out a BSD. They have excellent package dependency detection, and a better text installer to boot. OK, the OpenBSD installer isn't too hot when it comes to partitioning, but that and the shitty attitude of certain OpenBSD coders is why I run NetBSD as my first choice of OS.
I think RH and Mandrake are great for the linux newbie or the linux geek
And how many companies do you know that are running Debian as their Linux distribution of choice? I understand that Slashdot are, but they are a geek (god, I hate that word) novelty. All the businesses I have worked for in the last five or six years choose either RedHat, SuSE or a BSD.
Chris
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.
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
But if by quality you mean a system with new, hot and unstested packages and late security fixes, by all means RedHat must be of much higher quality
Do you or your employer (assuming you actually work), actually use Debian for mission critical systems? As I said in another post, how many companies do you know of who trust Debian as there Linux distribution of choice, (and no, a site like Slashdot is not a representative example)? The only corporate settings where I have heard rumour of Debian being used, is where it's been slipped in as a file server on the quiet.
All the Linux using companies I have worked at have followed a similar path in selecting their distribution:
Based on those criteria, the choice (made by programmers, not managers) has always been RedHat unless option one applies. And no, as a contractor I didn't have any input on those decisions.
Chris
Plus, Debian doesn't have a multi-Gb default install full of crap, contrary to some other distros ...
Hardcore Linux guru's are respected because they can pull off anything in Linux. Well I say this: it's about time the Hardcore Debian hackers show the world what they can do and create an installer that can put distros like RedHat & Madrake to shame.
Just my two cents,
Yuioup
> The difficult part is the second stage of the installation
No, no, I don't think so. The people complained about Debian not because of tasksel. After all, tasksel is just a bit more difficult than Redhat "install type". They complained it because there are so many things that Debian don't configure, and don't provide any interface to install other than reading HOWTOs.
See how sound is unconfigured, CD-RWs can't be written to, firewall accessible only to people with a text editor and time reading the long iptable doc, and even things as basic as setting date and time has no interface other than firing date and hwclock.
Don't get me wrong, Debian is now in everything I use regularly, and I love it the current way. After all, I don't have to do a system install until the next time I buy a new computer. But it is undeniable that Debian is not the easiest thing to put into your computer.
"Everybody I know likes RedHat so it must be the best!"
Nice logic.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
Does anyone really need XFree with KDE on a server period? X and KDE aren't really stable enough, imo. So, running them, on a server, probably wouldn't be a very good idea.
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/.
People bitch about the text based installer...but it has always worked fine for me. Now they bitch about the graphical installer because it's clumsy. Who the fuck cares? It gets the job done. And you'll only see it once in a long while unless you repeatedly hose your system.
Debian works great. The text based install works great. The progeny installer also works great. If you like pretty graphics, get a mac with OSX.
In other words. Quit your bitchin'.
There are only very few questions that the installer really, really needs to ask the user, and for those, a text interface should be sufficient.
Having done a Debian as my first shot at Linux for our company - I have to say that the installer gives WAY too many options that require you to be pretty familiar with the hardware you're running. I ultimately was able to ask questions and get things fixed, but our average user doesn't want to have to learn that much about their hardware.
.03 worth...
Red Hat was much simpler, and did a better job at probing and giving me reasonable defaults. It still had some goofs - but I was able to get the system running at a baseline so that I was fixing things "within" the system rather than from the outside.
Getting the installer "right" with reasonable guidance for the newbie, and options to override for the expert, seems to be one of the seemingly simple but incredibly difficult things that most distributions still need to get right.
Of course, the other thing I would like to see most distributions understand is that many people are bringing Linux into a Windows world. So having support from the install for Windows networks (mapped drives and authentication) would make it much easier to put on more desktops.
My
A graphical installer is all good and well, but it's essentially the text-based version at a higher resolution.
What we need is more enhancements to the 3.0 one -- i.e. better hardware detection, more linear structure, easier questions etc. Text mode is fine, as early RH installers proved.
Oh, and as for dselect: as others have pointed out, you don't have to use it. I've installed Debian 2.1 and 2.2 on some old laptops recently, and I just quit out of it straight away and use "dpkg -i" for whatever files I need.
Maybe I've been in the Debian camp too long but...
Linux has a graphical user interface? Is that like Macintosh or something?
What is music when you despise all sound?
The step by step process is extremely simple to follow, even the first time. Sure, hardware autodetection could be a plus and I have never found a use for tasksel and tasksel's idea of what can be useful for a particular task, but I really don't understand why Debian frightens people so much. Agreed, the first time use of dselect requires to read the help screen at least once to remember a handful of keys, but that's all. After that one can enjoy the bliss of installing whole packages and dependancies in very few keystrokes.
But on the other hand, maybe I love Debian too much to see any faults in it.
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.
Do you notice that more and more of the review spent their time on installation process ? I have even the feeling that review are just for the installation process.
:) ). I was frustated: none have a clue on daily usage. The install process is well described but ... just few words to almost no word on desktop/usage experience ... Problem of reviewer skill or lack of time ? Does users really spend their time reinstalling their distro (Windows habit too hard to drop :) )?
I am a 3 years Debian user (Redhat and Mdk before). Recently, I wanted to have a look on other distro in order to see the global improvement and how they perform in daily desktop usage.
To save time, I started to have a look at all this review on RedHat and Mdk (I use debian unstable everyday so no need for a review
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: 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
---- Sig. gone.
"Everybody I know likes RedHat so it must be the best!"
Nice logic.
Nope, or else it'd be Windows 2000 as that's the most popular OS among people I know. Anyway, what makes your opinion any better, I assume your a Debian user? The reason all the companies I worked at chose RedHat was because it was the one that met their technical needs. Now crawl back under your rock - I'm sure there's some more files you need to apt_get to keep your l33t system upto date.
Chris
Great idea! Lets hold up pogress on 99% of Debian installs to insure compatibility with platforms that make up a a ridiculously low amount of the installed base.
Why not? Debian is a "by the users, for the users" kind of noncommercial distribution. Compatibility with minority architectures may not be important to you, but it is a stated goal of Debian, and it is something that the developers and packagers wrangle with on a regular basis.
Branden Robinson, the XFree86 maintainer for Debian, has XFree86 running on more architectures than the XFree people themselves officially support -- his packages are the "de facto portabiltiy standard" for XFree86.
If you think progress is being "held up", then contribute to development on the arches you want supported, and let the developers who want to work on the minority platforms do so. Because they're not going away any time soon.
Jay (=
Thanks, Progeny! This is what free software is about. Debian provides a great base system, which works incredibly well for those who use it. Progeny has other ideas for it, so they extend it to work better for their target audience.
It's hard to complain about that.
Oh, except, it's stifling innovation, and commercialization. I forgot. Damn.
Can be a royal PITA, and Dselect isn't the only problem. Some of the install questions are pure greek to the average linux newbe, and many current users of other distros. Dselect's UI is often user hostile.
..... I've managed to install Bo, Slink, Potato, and now Woody. I suffered with Dselect on the first two, found apt-get a refreshing change with Potato, and later used gnome-apt. Now if deb-config would get cleaned up.....
But
I still wouldn't use any other distro.
There is a difference between giving users choices and pestering them with unnecessary questions. I can make most choices easily using admin interfaces that are much better than the installer once the basic system is up and running. And the few choices I might occasionally have to make during the install, I can make with Control-Alt-Fn and typing at a console.
DO NOT DUMB DEBIAN DOWN!!!
That is exactly what asking a lot of questions during the install is: dumbing down Debian. People who know what they are doing don't need to be asked those questions (they already know what to do), and people who don't know what they are doing shouldn't be asked those questions.
MS only runs on a much more uniform set of hardware, and vendors do often provide MS with better driver support than they provide Linux. And most installs do work most of the time. But even then they don't correctly install everything - if you've got newer hardware, you need to install driver disks for it, and if you're running one of the Administrator-oriented OSs, such as Win2000Pro, you can get into issues with user permissions - either you can't install something as a regular user, or you become Administrator to install it and the permissions get set in a way that you can't use it later when you're logged in as your regular user account again.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks