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Debian-Installer Alpha Released

Posted by timothy on from the soon-perfection dept.

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.

13 of 221 comments (clear)

  1. Downloading right now... by LucidityZero · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm working on it right now. I needed a new distro to mess around with anyway. I had always heard that the Debian installation was just a complete mess, so this is a step in the right direction. Hearing even slight news like this is enough to make me try it out, and I'm sure it'll help convince other people too.

    --
    Sig.i>
    1. Re:Downloading right now... by Gheesh · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It is *not* a complete mess, it just concentrates on software (all software sources can be defined at installation, so you can begin using apt-get as soon as it is finished) and leaves most hardware configuration up to you (no detection *at all*, just a list of kernel modules, some with no description whatsoever, to pick from).

      I think the new installer will definitely help Debian enlarge its user base

    2. Re:Downloading right now... by Brian+Kendig · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Does the new installer have hardware autodetection? I read the links in the article, but I can't find any detailed explanation of exactly what the new installer's all about.

      I've been trying Debian recently. The most frustrating thing about it is that the installer requires me to know what graphics chip I have, what sound chip I have, what network interface I have, what IrDA interface I have, and all sorts of other little hardware details that will foul up the system if I choose wrong.

      On my Dell laptop it took me a day to figure out what NIC driver I was supposed to use (a 3c5xx driver for a 3c905 card, go fig) so I could start the network install, then another day to figure out what video driver to use so X wouldn't hang on startup (I had a Neomagic chip, but I wasn't supposed to be using the Neomagic driver), and now it's been a few days and I still haven't been able to get audio working.

      I'm tired of digging around on mailing lists and web sites to figure out how to get Debian to behave. And lots of the available documentation is now outdated; for example, I was puzzled why I didn't have '/etc/conf.modules' until I figured out that it's been replaced by '/etc/modules.conf'. Huh.

      I really hope the new installer makes all this easier.

  2. XFS support? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I wish they'd ass XFS support for the default install. There are some unofficial boot floppies with XFS support, but they haven't worked for me.

    With my current install, I had to install on ext2, then copy / to another partition, make XFS-capable kernel, create XFS on the original / partition, and copy it back... It's a mess.

    fp?

  3. Great to hear by term0r · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is really great news for the Debian developers and the Debian userbase. Debian is a great installation but has one of the more complicated, unfriendly installers out there. This first puts off people changing to Debian from other dists. and secondly stops linux newbies trying out Debian.

    Hopefully this installer turns out to be as easy to use as installing Redhat, but hopefully will stay non bloated and run on low spec machines. Just out of interest has anyone ever tried the Mandrake or Redhat graphical installers run on a low spec machine? Does Mandrake include a command line only option like Redhat does?

    1. Re:Great to hear by etxjrh · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Yes, OK, an option would be nice. But debian is more flexible than many other distros, as the parent metioned. You can install to Sun/SGI workstations over a serial link, so you don't need a monitor or keyboard for the installed machine. Once you get it bootable and the network is up you can remote administer it. Debian's installer is well engineered for that sort of problem, though I admit for home x86 installations it sucks a little.

    2. Re:Great to hear by HiThere · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It may have been improved in the last couple of years, but the last time I tried it left me before X window was configured. Not nice. (I had somehow assumed that this was because some wizard popped up somewhere along the way to do the configuration, but not so.)

      The time before that, it wouldn't handle a large hard disk. (This HAD been a problem with the other distros around a year earlier, but not within the last 6 mo.s.)

      Debian is a great choice if what you are after is STABLE! But, historically at least, it has lagged in adopting changes. This is another example in a long series.

      This makes a great deal of sense, actually. You don't want to install server software very often, and you do want it to be very STABLE. So Debian has been ideally suited for a particular niche. But as desktops become more predominant, is there actually a larger place for a distribution that places stability over up-to-dateness? Probably a slightly larger place, but even holding onto it's basic user base is likely to be difficult. As computers become more powerful, the graphics front ends eat up a smaller fraction of the resources. (Well... ideally. OTOH the 2.4 kernel appears to be quite greedy for resources. So much so that I had to revert one of my smaller machines, or I couldn't even run efficiently in text mode.) So it becomes more reasonable to run a graphics front end on a server. This means that Debian needs to pay more attention to graphics setup, etc. So this new installer is not just nice, it's important to the survival of the distribution. FWIW, I find that I usually try the graphic tools before I try the text based tools, until I have learned the text based tools quite well. Even then... it's much nicer to select some files than to try to type in their names correctly...(is that a one or an ell?)

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    3. Re:Great to hear by MyHair · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      Agreed. When I installed Debian dselect drove me nuts for quite a while until I finally read up on apt-get. Dselect gave me as much depencency hell as RPM did; RedHat 6.2 advised not to try to install X after the the system was installed! I tried it anyway and hated RedHat since. But apt-get is way better, and I've used Debian package search to find things like xxd (a hex dumper that Debian told me was part of the vim package) and glxgears & glxinfo.

      apt-get dist-upgrade is just way too cool. Really. Potato (Debian 2.2r4) to Woody (Debian 3.0) with no problems. Wow. (Well, one problem: Gnotepad+ and some other package both fight over ownership of one html help file that I don't use.)

      Disclaimer: my early days of GNU/Linux go back to 1994 and the then-current version of Slackware. I've always like the text-based installers better. I guess it depends on how much you want to know and control the system versus how pretty and/or "easy" you want it.

      Another point that needs to be made is in comparing distro installers to commercial installers is the fact that there are more decisions to be made because there are more functions available to install from a free distribution than a commercial system. With Windows you have to jump through a few extra hoops to get IIS, SQL Server and other server software or MS Office installed, but in GNU/Linux distros you make that decision at the OS install. So part of the confusion is that there is more to choose from rather than buying the servers/apps as add-ons.

  4. Awesome! by afra242 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This, I am really happy about.

    Most Linux users at work love Debian from what they have seen on my laptop, but are intimidated by the installer, and what they have heard about it (ie. time consuming, tricky). Therefore, they won't use Debian...

    They would rather just put in a Mandrake, or Redhat CD and click a few mouse buttons and off they go with a new system, in less than 1/2 an hour.

    This is great news, and I will be keeping an eye on this. Soon enough, I'll make sure to push Debian onto other people once the installer reaches a significant level.

    Well done and congratulations to all involved in the Debian-Installer project!

  5. OK, but.. by jericho4.0 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I never had any problems with the debian installer, and I sure like what it left me with. I have Debian running on i386, mips and sparc. The sparc and mips platforms both have NFS root installs. In both cases I found myself pleased with the ease of install, although I did have to muck around with scripts, etc. But I expected that with 'weird' arches and installs.
    I have heard disses about it though, mostly from newbie types. As distrubutions go, I would like to see it easier to use for people who might not know their way around a linux box.
    Most of the complaints I've heard (and identified), deal with documentation, though. As I don't feel like doing a new install of Deb to test it, can anyone offer any insight as to what kind of improvments have been made? The article is kind of weak on that point.

    --
    "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
  6. Knoppix? by Ashish+Kulkarni · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I really hope that the Debian installer would have support for autodetection and configuration of all installed hardware, something like Knoppix (which is based on Debian) does. I know you can manually configure everything, but having all the hardware already known to it detected and configured would be great. This would mean that Debian would again be on the innovative edge of GNU/Linux distros...Debian does have the reputation of being a slow-moving, but stable distro.

  7. Support for VMware by sawak · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I wanted to test this in VMware but unfortunally the netinstall bootdisk didn't have support for VMware's network driver. I really think they should include it so it would be easier to try this out. I'm not going to run this on my normal computer and risk destroying all my data.

  8. Re:debian is dying by joib · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Well, about kde3, all I can say is that since I upgraded kde on my woody box to kde3, konqueror (and the few other kde apps I use) crashes a lot less than konqueror in kde 2.2.2. Not that I blame the packagers though, when the decision was made not to package kde3 not much was known about how stable it would be (if it even was released at the time, I don't remember). It could have been full of bugs, so it was certainly a better and safer choice to go with kde 2.2.2, which was known to be relatively bug-free.

    Anyway, hopefully they get to release sarge by the end of summer 2003. Or if they at least could get gcc 3.2 as the default compiler in sid by then...*sigh*..:)

    *dons asbestos kit*
    Related to the above, the weird thing about debian is their stubborn refusal to use a schedule. "Release when ready", what kind of mantra is that? Every human endeavour requiring cooperation among many individuals, related to computing, warfare, whatever, for pay or voluntary, benefits from a schedule. Hell, most people schedule their own lives too, for good or bad. What makes the debian project so special, that they can't use the same basic tool that almost all other projects in the world use?

    Yes, of course I know that debian developers are volunteers, they can't be forced to do anything. So what? It's not like debian is the only volunteer project in the world. Most schedule their activities somehow. It gives everyone a common goal to reach for.