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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.
... 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
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
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
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The Insomniac Coder
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Grow up Debian, stop trying to be all things and the most egalitarian OS in the world and make some hard decisions. Drop about 10 architectures from the release cycle and at least half of those 8,000 packages for starters.
What, then, would be the point of Debian? What you are describing is just about every other commercial distro out there - so why do we need another one? Debian works this way because there is a need for a distro that works this way. The commercial ones won't, because as you pointed out, there's no demand, so what's wrong with debian doing so? It fills a gap, albeit a very small gap, that no other distro does, and that makes it priceless. If you don't like Debian, use something else, but I don't see why it bothers you what they do - they're not asking you for money, or time, or anything. They're just doing there own thing. You don't start harping on about the local table-tennis club because, let's face it no-one plays table tennis - hey, why don't they play football or basketball or something "normal"? I think the simple answer is that they don't want to, and while they're not playing table-tennis in the middle of your football field, why should you care? If the table-tennis club exists it's because at least 2 people want to play table tennis.
Try NetBSD... safe,straightforward,useful.
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.
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
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?
Debian: GNU/Linux done the Linux way
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 (=