Slashdot Mirror
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.
Can someone explain ? is this Yet a New Case Of Reiventing The Wheel ? I thought that the Progeny (Debian based) installer : http://hackers.progeny.com/pgi/ was very nice and GPL too ?
Why is there a need to reinvent the wheel over and over again ?
What most people are going to think of when they see this is that this will make Debian's install more friendly. While this is very likely to happen, there are going to be other major benefits to this project.
The main one is that this will completely replace the old boot-floppies software that previous releases were based on. boot-floppies was, by all accounts, a major pain to deal with. For the release of woody, the installer was supposed to be re-written, but people complained and it was decided to "just" update boot-floppies once again for woody so that the release could get out the door quickly. This update took an extremely long time, so woody took a lot longer to release.
Sarge is largely waiting on debian-installer to be in good shape to release. No one, and I do mean no one, is willing to work on boot-floppies any more. I've never personally looked at the code, but I know it's just not worth it. debian-installer is modular and will provide the ability to have multiple frontends. The only one in place right now is the text-based frontend, so it's even uglier than the boot-floppies UI right now, but GTK and S-Lang frontends are in the works. Either way, the modularity of the new system will hopefully make it easier to update for new stable releases. boot-floppies was really holding things back there, much to everyone's dismay.
The other thing of note is that the entire installer is based on the debconf system (well, a rewritten C version of it actually), which is Debian's standard configuration backend. There are multiple frontends, like Gnome, Dialog (curses), and text-based for it, and it's in heavy use in Debian right now. It's a good system that's worked well, and using it in the installer will encourage even more standardization in an already fairly coherent distro.
As for this alpha, it only supports i386 right now. I don't know how far along the porting efforts are to other arch's, but a new Debian release won't happen until it's been ported everywhere that it needs to be. Still, the installer team has done a great job, and this is a project that the Debian community really should be paying close attention to.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
It has three branches (stable, testing, unstable) so you can choose your ratio of features to stability.
It has a large community of users to give support.
Each software package acts as a personal liason to upstream authors of software so you can get wishlist requests in and solid bugreports dealt with in a reasonable manner.
It has a completely open development process so you can see everything and even participate if you want.
It has a clearly defined and actively updated policy that provides standardization throughout the system (any package that violates policy is buggy by the way, and is treated as such).
It has an army of developers over a thousand strong who maintain "more than 8710 packages" to make this distribution the largest (what was that about no good software?)
There was a long and drawn out discussion about this on the debian-devel mailing list. If you want to sit around compiling your entire system from scratch, you're welcome to, but note that you can do this in Debian too, and keep things packaged. There's the apt-src package that will do this and keep all the debian stuff you love. This program hasn't had the most active development in the past (the author is one of Debian's best developers and contributes all over the place) but you can be sure it'll be improved soon. Plus, say what you will about Debian's install, it's way easier than gentoo's manual bootstrap method.
Besides, the majority of apps won't benefit from custom compilation enough to make it worth the time.
This traditionally hasn't been Debian's focus at all, but hopefully the desktop subproject will change that once it really gets going. And as for Lindows, it's based on Debian itself. Debian does serve as a fantastic platform for other people to build systems on.
I'm sorry, but if you put Debian stable vs. Redhat on the server you'll find Debian wins out everywhere that it needs to including upgrades and stability. Redhat gives you corporate support if you pay for it, which is a definite advantage when you need to cover your ass or you're ignorant. There's something to be said for a name brand, that's for sure.
The desktop project will hopefully work on this. I personally do just fine having fun and using multimedia on my Debian desktop system, but maybe that's just me and the thousands of other users like me.
Well, there's the HURD subproject in the works, as well as a NetBSD port. None of the other distros you mentioned have that. The reason for that is that Debian is far more than a Linux distribution, it's a whole project devoted to making a great system. This system can be ported to other kernels and other architectures. It's flexible and has the underlying infrastructure (like autobuilders and debbugs database) to handle this task. It's got the large quantity of manpower and the policies in place for managing it. Debian isn't a corporation, so it doesn't work the same way as Redhat, Mandrake, SuSE, and the rest. The closest one to it is Gentoo, and it's no mistake that Gentoo modeled its social contract on that of Debian.
Debian isn't the be all end all by any means. But it's an amazing project that moves at its own pace. While everyone else is worried about pretty installers, Debian is working on supporting computers that no one else supports. While everyone else is worried about grabbing the largest userbase, Debian is working on making the best system that the developers can put together. It just works differently than other distros. This doesn't make it obsolete, it makes it impressive.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
What? The Debian packaging system contains more packages than I will ever use, which cover ever type of application / daemon that I will ever need. Many times have I looked at some software I wish to install, to find that someone has already put it in the apt mirror, AND written a nice text based front end configuration from it.
USB mice - apt-get install hotplug detect gpm - and your away
Debians policies and standards are put in place to ensure that it will long be around after other commercial vendors have gone broke. It does not rely on cashflow and will be around a LOT longer than other distros.
You are a troll.
-mikkav
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.
I would argue that a well-designed and intuitive system shouldn't require the average technical user to RTFM for basic functionality.
Allowing in-depth technical use is an admirable feature, but forcing it is atavistic. It belongs in the past, just like boot floppies.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
The best news is that I now have a Linux distro that is exactly what I'm looking for. I got DISGUSTED with RedHat when I actually started poking around the kernel/packages and realized how bloated it is. I tried Gentoo, but I'll be honest, I just don't think I'm up to that level of Linux knowledge/comfort yet. Took me three installs (which are LENGTHY processes by the way) to even get it installed and working, and by that time the "emerge" function (the basis for the whole portage system) wasn't working right. Gentoo isn't worth much without emerge. :)
Anyways, even if the previous installer problems were only myth, that is a mute point. The point is that now people KNOW it has a better installer (on it's way in anycase) and should be able to nicely fill the gap between those than don't care that their Kernel compiles support for RAID, IDE and SCSI drives all at once no matter what your system setup is (i.e. RedHat and Mandrake) and those that enjoying recompiling their kernel 17 times before they have a working installation (i.e. Gentoo and Slackware)
The question I want to raise is this: Could this be bad news for Debian? Is a more friendly installer going to end up with a more bloated distribution as well?
Sig.i>
Installing an operating system should be easy. And it will require skills most people wish to ignore.
No, it should not.
An OS is the most complex piece of software that a user will ever be asked to install on his/her machine, so it should be uneasy (yuk) to install, so that Joe A. Luser really understand what he is doing.
Intuitive, maybe (never had any problem with the Debian installer, but the new installer system was created to replace the old one, which was unmaintainable). But not easy. An easy installer hides the fact that an OS is intrinsecally a complex thing.
Users that do not want to endeavour in switching to another operating system, should not be induced in thinking that an operating system is just like any other software the install and de-install.
You can save space. Or you can save time. Don't ever count on saving both at once. -- First Law of Algorithmic Analisys
There is still a bug on sparc related to gcc 3.2 being the default compiler. It is hoped that it will be fixed this weekend. While debian is not the fastest dist to get stuff out from my experience it tends to be far more solid when it comes out.
During large transitions it typically lags far behind the other commercial dists but it does a better job at the conversion. I have had too many X, KDE, python, ZOPE etc problems on various other dists that I just got sick and tired of it.
Sid is more stable then Redhat and Mandrake are and the software is more likely to just work which is mostly related to better packaging.
I get paid to do other stuff then babysit the boxes so I want software that works all the time and for me and that means using Debian and waiting until the software is ready.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
Even the easiest Linux distros nowadays can overwhelm some users. Let them learn with RH or Mandrake, and when they've seen it all and worked their way to the system's innards, they'll move naturally to the leaner distributions.
I've installed both Debian Woody and FreeBSD on my laptop, so on the record I agree with you.
FreeBSD 4.7 detects almost everything. You can install this thing by just doing a quick partition, accepting auto defaults, installing the boot manager, and setting a Root Password (although it's probably best to set up a UK keyboard and stuff.) You can actually install this thing off 802.11b... While X is still a configuration blackspot (and one which is fixable), and audio isn't loaded by default, the only thing FreeBSD didn't detect was the audio (a quick kldload later...) and the non-supported softmodem.
But then, Debian doesn't support the softmodem either, and it has many other problems too. Not only do you need to know that under Linux the keyboard for the United Kingdom is 'gb' ('uk' is the Ukraine), which no newbie is going to know, but the X Windows configuration is insane (at least xf86config has names like "NVIDIA GeForce"), and dselect is the Spawn of Satan. The only thing I used dselect for was installing aptitude, but who apart from the Slashdot crowd has ever heard of aptitude? And besides, they shouldn't need to read three pages of obfuscated 'help' to be able to install a package.
I know there are problems with FreeBSD too, my rubbish on-board sound system being a case in point - it needs IIC and other non-default options compiled in to work. But in comparison to Debian it's a veritable OS X; and besides, I had much the same trouble with Deb too. Most of the problems with Debian originate from its boneheaded installer and, of course, dselect: once those are fixed, it will become a much better distribution for techie and newbie alike.
I can give that crusty dselect the finger...
You have no idea what you're talking about. dselect is an excellent package management tool if you've actually read the quick-help instead of just ignoring it and mashing keys until the dependancy resolving dialogs are gone.
It takes a whopping 5 minutes to read the help docs. Amazing how lazy people are these days! And then they complain that Debian is un-friendly!
> 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.
There's plenty to learn; the difference is, most people will want to do that learning at their leisure, after a smooth, event-free install, rather than being forced to learn these things 'under fire' before they'll be allowed to have a usable system. After all, would you guess that "tulip" was the network driver for your card if you didn't know beforehand? How about "nv" for the NVidia driver?
There's always time to inspect the filesystem layouts, and read up on the rationale behind them, and look at lsmod and the modules subdirectories in general - but let's at least be able to do this from a running, system.