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Progeny Ports Red Hat's Anaconda To Debian
JoeBuck writes "According to
this message from Ian Murdock on the Debian developer's mailing list, the
Progeny folks
have ported Red Hat's Anaconda installer to Debian.
They have also written a tool that "facilitates the creation of Anaconda-based Debian installation CD sets". They are also engaged in other interesting unification work, and hope to be able to allow collections of managed RPM and .deb packages to coexist side-by-side."
uberkludge points out an article with more details at Ars Technica.
One very nice utility they might be able to use is Alien which allows you to convert from rpm's to debs and many other formats as well
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
These Anaconda Screenshots look good and could make Debian a lot easier to approach for Joe Average.
--
I have a truly marvellous reason to post this as an AC, which however the margin is not large enough to contain.
Debian do have a new installer. Petter Reinholtsen, Michael Cardenas, Tollef Fog Heen and the the others of the Debian-Installer team has made a new installer for Debian Sarge.
l .en
s taller/
r /doc/TODO?re v=HEAD&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup
Skolelinux uses this new installer today!:
http://developer.skolelinux.no/index.htm
URL to the new Debian Installer:
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-in
Todo list for the new Debian Installer:
http://cvs.debian.org/debian-installe
Though debian-installer, once it's done, should improve things significantly, how often do you really see the installer? Seriously, how often?
That's true enough, but it does need work. I used to defend the debian installer until recently, as I found it easy enough to use. But I recently tried to get woody installed on two new servers and had a hell of a time getting it on there. I had to do do it mostly myself in the end, by tarring and scp'ing stuff from another server. Once Debian is installed on a machine it's damn near flawless in my experience, and a real pleasure to administer. But getting it on recent machines can sometimes be a pain. It's probably more of an issue for server hardware than desktops though.
There's nothing inherently wrong with them except that you need to do several things manually that happen automatically with rpms and debs (pre & post install scripting, keeping a record of what gets installed where for updates/upgrades/uninstall).
Jilles
What is a subversion repository?
Subversion is a CVS replacement that tries to fix some of the weirdness that is CVS. I've been using it for about a year, and have found it to be very nice -- not much new to learn, and acts in a much more sane manner than CVS. It's still alpha for now (and using it ATM requires that you update fairly regularly), but it seems to be rapidly approaching the beta milestone.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Open up /etc/networks/interfaces to add/edit/remove your network interfaces. Contact me on Jabber (see www.unrealtower.org for address) if you need more help.
Python as a required part of the base install... Some will dance, others will puke.
Also, tiny root partitions w/ everything other than /bin /lib /etc mounted did not work w/ Ananconda - at least with RH 7x. You needed a couple hundred MBs free in / to install. This required some fancy "behind the scenes" work - from a console between installer stages - for me to get my 6.2 boxes up to 7.0.
Of course, if you throw the works into /dev/hda1 - there's no prob! Unless you are worried about local priv escalation and other *NIX security issues...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Alien is good for the occasional package where dependencies are a minor concern.
.rpm files can already be handled directly in Debian (not by apt) if they are LSB compliant, but the only thing these packages depend on is the LSB package that provides support for the version of the LSB specification that is required by the .rpm.
.rpm files on a Debian based system. And it may only be a small stretch to add support for managing an RPM based distrobution on another machine using APT from a Debian based distrobution or vice versa.
.deb and .rpm files on the same system is a little more of a stretch. In which case the phrases:
The problem with Alien is you lose the dependency tracking information during the package conversion, so it is not good on a larger scale.
I believe
Viewing the quote with that context in mind and including the next statement in the quote:
"We are also working with various parties to add/merge RPM support
into the mainline APT, to allow Debian- and RPM-based
distributions to be managed using a single APT codebase, and
possibly even to allow Debian and RPM packages to coexist side by
side. This work also aims to merge our various APT extensions
(e.g., support for authenticated APT repos) into the mainline APT.
It is our hope that a distribution-independent Anaconda and
a distribution-independent APT (plus, eventually, a distribution-
independent configuration framework) will, along with a
stronger LSB, help unify further the various Linux distributions."
Relatively speaking, it is probably only a small stretch once the codebase is unified to add support for management of LSB compliant
To add full support for handling of
"possibly even to allow Debian and RPM packages to coexist side by side"
and
"along with a stronger LSB"
become key phrases.
Later, Seeker
I'll quote from Fedora Core 0.95 Release Notes at http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/ :
/etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources file.
The Red Hat Update Agent (up2date) now supports installing packages from apt and yum repositories as well as local directories. This includes dependency solving and obsoletes handling. Additional repositories can be configured in the
Fedora Core is the new name for the free Red Hat distribution.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Tip of the Day If you're having trouble figuring out what kernel modules you need, boot from a Knoppix cd. The output from dmesg should tell you modules you need.