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

[piranha(jpl)]

Debian is a great installation but has one of the more complicated, unfriendly installers out there.

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.

This first puts off people changing to Debian from other dists. and secondly stops linux newbies trying out Debian.

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.

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.

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?

Re:Great to hear

[blincoln]

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.

Re:Great to hear

[inode_buddha]

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.

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?)

Re:Great to hear

[MyHair]

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.

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.

Is this a YNCORW ?

[Khalid]

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 ?

Re:Is this a YNCORW ?

[neksys]

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.

Re:Is this a YNCORW ?

[krmt]

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.

Re:Is this a YNCORW ?

[tfheen]

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)

What This Means For Debian

[krmt]

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.

Re:screenshots?

[krmt]

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.

Knoppix?

[Ashish Kulkarni]

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.

Re:debian is dying

[krmt]

Debian is using outdated software (KDE 2.2, Gnome 1.2), an outdated kernel (2.2).

For stable, yes, but that's stable. If you're running stable, you probably want the most rock-solid software you can get. KDE3 and Gnome2 aren't rock-solid yet and kernel 2.2 is very well proven (and still maintained). Kernel 2.4 is an install option for stable as well, by the way. Plus, nothing is stopping you from installing your own up to date kernel on Debian.

It has NO compelling features, whats the point of apt-get if you cant get good software for it.

It has the largest number of supported platforms of any Linux distro, which is great if you've got a Sparc or an old Power Mac lying around.

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?)

Theres gentoo for the geeks

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.

lycoris/lindows for people who think the internets aol

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.

theres red hat for server stuff

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.

suse for destkop work, and mandrake for multimedia and fun

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.

Why dosent the team just fuckget about linux and concetrate on the turd

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.

Proper announcement

[mr_tenor]

Is here
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announc e/2002 /debian-devel-announce-200212/msg00002.html

Including links to an .iso and details about this release/filing bugreports.

PLEASE test....

[a ( h 3 r 0 n]

The last editor's note is an EXTREMELY valid one... if you use Debian in any way, please, please test the new installer. Now really is the time, folks. The most common complaint about debian is the installer. Don't sit back and assume everything will work itself out, and then complain about the new installer when sarge hits stable down the road.

Developers NEVER have enough people testing and reporting quality feedback. So again, if you use Debian at all, please help out.

Re:XFS support?

[nexex]

should've used this:

http://people.debian.org/~blade/XFS-Install/

Re:XFS support?

[Dave114]

Joking asside, do any distro's come with XFS by default?

Mandrake (9.0) gives you the option in the installer.

Re:debian is dying

[joib]

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.

Re:Support for VMware

[simondo]

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.

Misconception

[IkeTo]

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.

Current status for other arches

[tfheen]

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.

Re:Finally...

[Ogerman]

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!

Re:Downloading right now...

[Brian Kendig]

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.