Slashdot Mirror
The Very Verbose Debian 3.0 Installation Walkthrough
Gentu writes "Cited the general displeasure which accompanied the Debian 3.0 release, mostly regarding its dated installation procedure, Clinton De Young wrote an easy-reading but long article for OSNews going through the Debian installation step by step. Of course Progeny released recently the PGI graphical installer, but it is not as complete as the current Debian text-based installer and it will definately be quite some time before it get adopted by the project."
Instead of spending the time to create a guide through the installation, it might be a better idea to make a more intuitive installation system. That's one thing RedHat/Mandrake have over Debian. If Debian wants to increase its market share, it will have to follow their lead and "dumb itself down" a little for less experienced users.
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
Yey, the more newbs on Linux the better. Just think if everyone knew how to install it, and then we could finally ditch M$ and take over the world!! Muhuhahahahahaha!!!!
Bill
-Bill
Increase its market share? Debian developers don't get paid for all the hard work they do. Why should market share matter?
Besides, the installer is not that difficult.
The problem with people today is that they've been babied for too long. It is not difficult to learn how to install an OS. Hell, you might actually come out of the process with some knowledge. People who do learn how to do things have much less need for tech support and have many fewer problems. Companies should stop wasting their time trying to oversimplify everything. It's like holding a teenagers hand as they try to cross the street. Its totally unecessary and lets people remain total n00bs.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
As has been said a hundred times before (I'd link specific comments, but check back to any other thread about Debian), Debian isn't a distro for new Linux users. It can be, but that is not it's main purpose in life. If I were asked to summarize Debian's main purpose in life, I would say "to provide Linux on some more obscure hardware platforms and to put the F back into Free."
/dev/hda2 instead of /dev/hdb2), but otherwise, I followed my 13 page printout to the letter and not only did I have an installed system at the end of it, I knew how the installation worked. I knew all about partitioning and filesystems and swapfiles and hopefully someone who has never seen these things before will know what they all are at the end, as opposed to someone who hits "Enter" (or worse, clicks "OK") multiple times.
People say Debian's installer sucks for people who don't know what they doing. I had trouble the first time I installed Debian. I can whisk through the installer with no problems now.
I installed Gentoo some months ago for a LUG demo. The installation process ate my Windows partition (because I was an idiot and typed mke2fs
Putting the installer into X or gtkfb will sure make it seem a bit more friendly for new users, but unless it's backed up by a great set of administration tools for package management etc such as Red Hat provide, you're just fooling people into thinking that they can get by without knowing anything.
I think something like what has been produced here is what Debian needed more than a graphical installer - this page will instill the sense that "if you read the instructions, complex tasks become simple" into people, and that's what really counts.
If you're going to change something about Debian, change dselect. It's horrible. It needs to be changed. I haven't used dselect since I learnt how apt worked, but sometimes it would come in useful if it wasn't so god awful!
RTFM is a damned sight easier to say to someone if they have a decent manual available. Lets hope this guide can fill that void.
Does somebody somewheres not know the definition of plug and play?
See, there is this USB port thing, and you, err, plug stuff into it, and, uh, well, heh, it is supposed to kind of, err, work.
If USB mice require configuring then there are more serious problems here then just the lack of a graphical installer. . .
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Redhat's administrative tools are graphical and there's really no good analogue in Debian.
Debian is in no way an uber-geek distro or anything. The installation is actually one of the best I've ever seen. This is mainly because you can choose the order in which you want to set up your installation. :)
If you don't know what to do, the installer gives you the most logical next step and alternatives. Switching back and forth between different installation steps is also very easy (if you screw up or forget something).
The terminal also comes in quite handy sometimes (although I don't think it's something for newbies)
The only thing that makes Debian "hard" to install is the fact that you have to use your keyboard to navigate (tab, arrows, enter) instead of pointing and clicking. And if you would just take 5 minutes to master your keyboards navigational keys, you'dn notice it's not such a daunting task afterall
Same goes for configuring the system after initial boot. Debconf will help you trough it all, with almost every ease of the graphical configuration tools on other distros. Although the package selection can be a pain in the ass, but then again, you could just select tasks, instead of individual packages.
I think the main problem is that some people don't like the Debian installation/configration because ncurses looks "old" :)
"The majority is always sane, Louis." -- Nessus
http://slashdot.jp
Last time I installed Debian, I wrote about 20 points of installation instructions in a notebook. The instructions are simple, and let you quickly set up similar systems without needing to search online for more information.
Soon I'll be creating a webpage, so you too can run an open-relay EXIM server.
http://jesus.everdense.com/
And many of them also have some ideological views (like breaking the monopoly of a certain software giant)
I think their market share actually DOES matter to them.
(I agree on the installer though)
"The majority is always sane, Louis." -- Nessus
http://slashdot.jp
Insert media
Boot
Enter hostname and IP address [NON DHCP SYSTEMS ONLY]
Done.
If it's harder than that, get a better operating system.
I know some Linux distros aren't there yet, but some are (stand up Suse and Red Hat).
OS/400 has been like this for over twenty years (except the IP stuff - LU6.2, SNA, oh the memories)
Solaris is just like that.
Installation is a difficult, but solved problem. Before you start whinging about different device drivers, incompatible IRQs, horizontal sync rates and other inanities, ask yourself why IBM, Sun, HP, Microsoft et al. have solved the problem.
If you want real geek cred, make the hurd work, or add an optimisation to gcc. Or, possibly, build an installer for Linux. Working through a difficult install is a waste of everybody's time.
Thank you and good night.
It's not really a matter of noobies vs. geeks, or intutive vs. non-intuitive, is it? It's a matter of automation.
Most modern installers automatically detect hardware settings and proceed accordingly.
Why would an ubergeek prefer to enter in chip information any more than a noobie?
And why would a super-intuitive interface (if there is such a thing), or at least a conventional one, solve the problem of the installer not figuring it all out automatically?
Finally, would an ubergeek reject Debian if it were as easy to install as Mandrake or Redhat? Is that all there is to Debian that makes it a distribution of choice for geeks?
In open source, a lot of people will vocally voice their opinions that projects should be similiar to each other.
Debian is a great example of this. You frequently hear complants of a non-graphical installer, usually with the comment 'but my $preferred_distro has a graphical installer!' I haven't looked at the exact reasons why debian doesn't have a graphical installer, but an educated guess would take into effect the roughly dozen hardware platforms debian supports and the fact that debian will do things in ways that usually won't break - autodiscovery has the potential to cause problems. Plus, this is the distro where I can stick a few floppies into a machine, do a tiny install and skip tasksel and dselect, then apt-get apache, sshd and iptables, and have a small, fairly secure webserver without ever needing to download x.
The other complaint is that debian should have up to date packages. Debian's philosophy isn't to ride the bleeding edge, its to make sure everything works, and that stable is named stable for a reason.
I see a lot of this going on in the open source movement, and its just wrong. If Debian wants to be a better Redhat, the developers should join the Redhat team. Same with other projects. If mySQL tries to be postgres, even if it succeeds, we will have lost something. However, if mySQL strives to be a fast SQL database for websites, then we will have two good databases, both with a different purpose.
Each project should have a purpose, a goal, and it should be different from the other projects. Else there is just duplication of efforts and time lost as each project reinvents the wheel.
I was just asking for this same thing on Debian Community.
/etc/fstab will need to be edited if the newbie wants to see his Windows partition.
This is a nice start, but it leaves a lot of hurdles for a new user to overcome.
(1) DMA still needs to be turned on for the hard-disk.
(2) It may sound heretical, but most folks will want the Nvidia OpenGL drivers (this is a real pain)
(3)
(4) printing...
(5) As mentioned in the article, most people use KDE or Gnome.
(6) CD-RW and DVD
(7+) I'm sure I've missed something. Just thinking back to the last time I set up a desktop system, I seem to remember adding my user account into a number of different groups to get things working properly.
Anyway, this isn't a bad article...it looks like a great place to start, but I think any newbie moving from Mandrake to Debian following these instructions will be left completely pissed off that their machine is now incredibly slow (1 above) and can't play a game like Chromium (2 above).
If you're going to change something about Debian, change dselect. It's horrible. It needs to be changed. I haven't used dselect since I learnt how apt worked, but sometimes it would come in useful if it wasn't so god awful!
Try aptitude. It's far better. It still suffers from the my-hell-this-list-is-huge problem, but making 11,000 packages not seem intimidating is a daunting task. Part of Debian's problem vis-a-vis Redhat, etc. is the fact that Debian packages so much more stuff. That's a fact that makes for a huge list of packages, but a huge list of well-integrated components is a *good* thing. So use aptitude, use it's search feature when you know part of the package name and use 'apt-cache search' when you're not sure what you're looking for, and life will be a bliss never known by users of other distros... ;-)
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I have bounced from Red Hat to Mandrake, and gave Debian a try. The installer can be a pain if you have odd hardware that is supported by Linux. You just have to keep tring the install untill you find the right combo of drivers. Or, use Libranet. The installer is still text based, but it will auto detect hardware most of the time. Using Libranet 2.7 I installed a whitebox I bought and it found and detected the NIC and video card the first time around. The only thing it did not like was the SIIG ATA133 card for the the extra hard drives and the onboard sound. :O
I have installed Libranet on a few machines and only had a few problems with M$ specific devices, and onboard sound cards. The 2.7 version has default options for people that do not understand disk partitioning and is even on a bootable disk!
no
...to get the job done. When a friend and I co-wrote the "Linux Installation Project" a long time ago, we explained practically every step necessary to installing RedHat 5.0 or Slackware 3.4. We figured that explaining anything less than every step would mean that somebody would get lost in the process somewhere.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware