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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.
Ian Murdock is the "ian" in Debian. Deb is Debra, his wife.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
What happened to using the Knoppix stuff in the Debian installer? I think the hardware detection of Knoppix really kicks ass.
The thing I think troubles new users most isn't the choise between package types - it's partitioning the harddisk and knowing what their hardware actually is. That last one can be helped by good hardware detection, but partitioning a disk is something else. What do you think would be best to make partitioning as easy as possible?
I wonder if they fixed the bugs in Anaconda that prevent it from understanding an fstab which contains either:
a LABEL= line instead of a device name
a file system type of "auto"
(and yes, I have reported both to RH.)
Perhaps they even fixed it so that when there is a failure, you have the option of going to another VC, fixing the problem, and trying again, rather than Anaconda's current behavior of "Nope. Had an error. Gonna reboot now. Definitely gonna reboot. [OK]"
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I have a UNIX background, including a bit of UNIX on PCs going back 15 years. I'm a Linux newbie, but I've had great luck using Knoppix full time on an obsolete, almost diskless PC in the office.
Based on the idea that "Knoppix is just Debian" I've been trying to install Debian on a PC where Knoppix just plain works. It's driving me nuts. The network install tells me the network card isn't there even though I point it to the right driver (out of 2-3 cryptically-named choices for a RealTek compatible.) I have a slight idea of the appropriate driver options after I boot into Windows and record the interrupts and such Windows sees. Still no luck.
I juggled and made disk space and downloaded the Woody ISOs...and the Sarge ISOs where it says that Sarge will only install if you have Woody first (I think) and the jigdo docs on how the Debian updates have to be applied to the .iso files (under Linux!) and then burned.
Anyway, I'm still willing as time allows to read and learn and try and read and learn and beat this but I KNOW it should be easier because KNOPPIX IS EASIER!
Yeah, I know I can install Knoppix on a hard disk. I want to try and learn "real" Debian.
Yeah, I know I can ask for help on the Debian forums. I have searched there for ideas. Asking for help is another thing I'll do when I get a round tuit.
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Well, apart from assembler or maybe COBOL, I am at a loss imagining a language of which you couldn't say that.
Isn't the problem rather that hardware detection has a different logic on powerpc?
This seems awfully backwards to me. I don't mean to start a ditsro flame war, but as a Debian user I've *never* had to use a Redhat package. Debian's repository is ridiculously huge (actually, too huge, in my opinion) and is well maintained by the packagers and the high Debian standards.
If anything, Redhat should be making it easier to have debs and rpms live side by side on their machines. In fact, Redhat's whole Fedora thing just seems like an attempt to recreate Debian. Why bother?
This is getting a little bit off-topic, but take gnome for example. Gnome properly requires dozens of different libraries to accomplish what it needs - but many times I hear people bitch and moan about gnome's "dependency hell". I am throughly convinced the people who are complaining about that are just the people who's distros don't have (or aren't employing) proper library dependency checking, upgrading, versioning, etc. And what do you know, that's exactly the sort of thing Debian solves beautifully.
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I don't know if you've ever actually worked with anaconda, but (like other open source software) it's possible to hammer it do whatever you need. There is support in anaconda for non i386 archs (s390, sparc, and IIRC, vestigial traces of the alpha installer). Yes, it's going to be a pain to implement code to handle new archs (like the PPC), but there are enough examples of how to do it that it should be possible.
:) It's going to enable some cool stuff to be done with Debian.
The one thing that makes me downright ecstatic in all this is the prospect of being able to use the "kickstart" feature of anaconda for Debian. RH's kickstart is pretty damn flexible (as opposed to FAI, FreeBSD's unattended install mode, Solaris's jumpstart, and even the Winders solutions that are available). With the kickstart, it's possible to build and install a customized system from modular parts (instead of having to rely on image based installs)... and that makes it easy to slide in updates or quickly implement new install types.
Hardware autodetection is abstracted out via kudzu (yes, it's a pain after the OS is installed, but at install time it's a godsend and makes probing hardware programmatically much easier).
On top of that, you can hack up anaconda to do some other "interesting kickstartish type stuff" (in the words of Matt Wilson).
Kudos for the Progeny boys for making this available.