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.

Comments

Great to hear

[term0r]

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?

Re:Great to hear

[HiThere]

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?)

Awesome!

[afra242]

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!

OK, but..

[jericho4.0]

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.