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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.
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?
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!
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
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."
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."
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."
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
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.
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.
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!