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Debian-Installer Alpha Released
robstah writes "An alpha release of the next generation Debian installer (Debian-Installer) has been announced. Debian-Installer is an actively developed replacement for the older and now rather delapidated boot-floppies installer. This alpha release is available for i386 only as ports to other platforms are not yet significantly mature. Volunteers are requested to test this new installer and help contribute to Sarge, the next release of Debian GNU/Linux." Now's the time to complain if you want to be heard.
That's the beauty of open source - you can reinvent the wheel as many times as you want. Yo leave it up to the end use to pick the wheel that rolls the best.
Progeny's installer (known as PGI) doesn't work on non-x86 archs (it may work on PPC, but not on the majority of the arch's that Debian supports). From what I understand, there's no movement towards porting it to other arch's, either because it's difficult or people aren't interested in doing so. Anthony Towns (the Release Manager for Debian) basically just wants a working installer, and debian-installer is what people are actually working on.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
There's not much to see yet, it's only a text-based install right now. S-Lang and GTK frontends are in the works though.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Is herec e/2002 /debian-devel-announce-200212/msg00002.html
.iso and details about this release/filing bugreports.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announ
Including links to an
That may be correct if you're not familiar with Linux, but if that is the case, one will find that reading the installation manual helps. It's a very detailed document that covers just about everything and every possibility; compare that to the quality of documentation that other distributions provide.
It's been said many times: Debian isn't for newbies. However, I recommend Debian to newbies if they want to learn Linux and not be hand-held through the installation and configuration processes. There's not much to learn when your idea of filesystem allocation is a bar graph, and you're not even presented with the names of the kernel modules you can choose.
It's not just about running on low spec machines. Keeping the installation simple (in terms of internal design, not UI) eliminates many problems and allows you to do many flexible things. Things break less. Hardware auto-detection and other forms of hand-holding is probably why my last Mandrake installation froze indefinitely (8.2, in VMware); I've had a similar experience with a recent Redhat version (on a non-emulated machine).
In short, I don't understand why the existing installer gets so much flak. I'll admit dselect stinks for too many reasons to list here, and I find tasksel to be over-generalized. Therefore, I recommend that people search for packages they want, and install them with apt-get after the installation procedure.
The only remaining challenge with installing Debian is that you understand concepts like partitions, filesystems, kernel modules, etc. If you do, the installation is a breeze (although I've been through it many times). If you don't, the installation manual covers all of this.
Anything I'm overlooking?
Developers NEVER have enough people testing and reporting quality feedback. So again, if you use Debian at all, please help out.
http://people.debian.org/~blade/XFS-Install/
Winter 2010: With Glowing Hearts
Mandrake (9.0) gives you the option in the installer.
Debian-installer is an old project, it will soon be three years since the first commits into the CVS repository.
PGI is nice and everything, but does not use debconf, it is monolithic, which means that it's a lot harder to rip out a part of it and replace with something else (say you want EVMS or LVM instead of normal partitions). This is quite easy with debian-installer.
In addition, there is the issue of PGI not being ported to anything but i386 and PPC. d-i already works on hppa, and is getting into shape on s390 and ia64.
Since debian-installer uses debconf for interaction, it will be quite easy to support automated installations as well.
--
Tollef Fog Heen (d-i hacker)
The ISO supports it fine: First make sure you select all the NIC modules under the packages to install (7,9,10) Then, under configure network hardware, choose no to select the driver yourself and then enter pcnet32 for the module to load - Bingo.
There are so many here that expects Debian installer will address the "very difficult to install for newbies" problem of the old boot floppies. So many that it becomes very compelling to reply every of them about the bad news for them. But then it will waste so much time, that I'd better just write it top-level.
Debian Installer (d-i) is a developer's project. The problem addressed by d-i is the problem of developers, not end-users. You will be very disappointed if you expect a very nice GUI install when trying out d-i. It simply won't make it any more newbie-proof than the old installer of Debian. At least, not now.
The problem addressed by d-i is the difficulty for developers to create boot floppies. It is difficult to create boot disks, no matter what is the distribution. For other distributions where half of the time of the developers is allocated to new installation and where nobody sees any part of the distribution when it is "work in progress", this is no problem. But for Debian, most developers install it once, and never install it again because it is so good in upgrading. For other distributions, installers are the first things they work on when creating a new version. For Debian, it is the last thing that gets started. Not to mention: they must be built manually, e.g., to try making sure that the floppy size is small enough, to remove some files of packages if it doesn't fit, etc. The effect: installation never get well tested.
The d-i project is the study about why creating boot floppies are so difficult, and tries to resolve them so that they can be created automatically. Everyone should really try to read the second half of the "Woody retrospective and Sarge introspective" mail posted by the release manager here . This will give you an idea about what are the issues involved.
So why you should care? First, it will be the installer that you will use. Second, this will be the basis where future improvements to the installers will be made, not the PGI or whatever installer. Third, once it is ready, you will be able to get testing installed directly rather than having to install stable and then upgrade basically all packages to testing (or unstable). For now, test if you can.
According to my fellow hackers, hppa works, s390 is getting there, ia64 is getting there, alpha, ppc and m68k have started, Sparc isn't begun yet, nor are mips, mipsel, arm. The porting efforts for cool projects like Debian GNU/NetBSD and the Hurd haven't really begun.
Here's how I do a bare-bones RH install... I've done this on 486's even with RH8.
1. At the bootup screen, select "text mode" install
2. Set up your partitions, etc.
3. When you get to the "Package Selection" screen, choose either "workstation" of "server" as appropriate.
4. Do *not* opt to select individual packages
5. *Unselect* everything
6. Proceed
This leaves you with a bare-bones install between 90 - 150 mB, depending on the RH version.
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