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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.
Bill has you working this early on a Saturday morning?
Trolling is a art,
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
It's true. You couldn't get a first post to save your life.
... and hope to be able to allow collections of managed RPM and .deb packages to coexist side-by-side ...
I hope that all other distro creators work towards this too, so many packaging formats just confuse new Linux users, and make it even more difficult for Linux to take part in the desktop world.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
My anaconda don't want none unles you got buns, hon.
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.
Progeny had a graphical installer available for their Debian-based distro for years, and instead of taking over this one, Debian started creating its own graphical installer despite of a great lack of human resources for the project.
Now I don't know much about Anaconda or what it really is, and I also don't know much about Debian's reason not to use the Progeny installer, but you'll understand that I'm not really convinced that this would change installing Debian until I've heard confirmations from the Debian side of things.
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
They'll almost certainly be taken out, there's no reason for a Debian install to have RedHat pictures.
But I wouldn't say they were really ads, at least not for other companies. Some were interesting facts, and others told about stuff like RHCE's/up2date/etc.
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
This is certainly a good thing for corporations adopting Debian... especially since Redhat now has it's 1 year End Of Life policy for it's desktop products. I've always found Debian's release policy FAR more stable than almost any other distro out there, and stability is probably the main focus of most companies (far more than the latest wizz-bang features).
Hopefully this will see more corporations adopting Debian, Linux, and will result in a more unified installation process.
**FREE** Track and view your phone's via CellID and/or WIFI and/or GPS
However, I think the main obstacle that prevent Debian from being more widely accepted is the fact that the debian folks are very reluctant to package "wizards" and automatic configuration scripts in the distribution.
Of course, there is debconf, but its invocation is rather tricky for non Debian-savy users.
I've been using a Debain-based distro called MEPIS for several months now. FWIW, I've contributed to the developer because I really dig this OS.
It features a live CD like Knoppix and lets you install the distro through the live CD w/an installation application. In addition - the hardware detection was damn near flawless - talk about your easy install of Debain!!
Everyone knows having a shitty installer is what makes an OS leet!
Then when only super experts can install it just saying you use it shows instant leetness!
Sure, you don't know why OpenBSD is more secure or how to use ipfilter but by george you got it installed on your laptop! Well now, aren't you mr. leet. When average joes and janes can just slap a debian cd in their drive and be up and running with no troubles how will you get respect as a leet dood? You'll have to switch to gentoo!
Shit, gentoo is so leet it doesn't even have an installer!
If debian gets an installer that anyone can use to get up and running in less than half an hour that will definatly be a problem for debians leet factor.
Oh yeah... cause you know, I'm reinstalling Debian all the time... wait. That's right, I'm NOT. I last installed Debian on my home desktop about 4 or 5 _years_ ago, and it's never once needed reinstalling. Though debian-installer, once it's done, should improve things significantly, how often do you really see the installer? Seriously, how often?
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Debian's had a decent installer for years (through PGI or Knoppix). They're not the official installers (and Anaconda won't be either), but the option has always been there.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
By ads, I meant advertisements of distro's features, which I agree is reasonable. Just wondering what Debian'll put there instead.
Now I'm not usually one to protect users from computers and in particular linux, but when it comes to the computer illiterate (is that spelled right :P ). I usually try and steer them towards one of the safer distros like RedHat or Mandrake, its not because I prefer either of those two for working on, its simply that debian besides being difficult to successfully install (though not as confusing as OpenBSD), features enough different packages to make anyone a little lost.
It has quite frankly always been the "power users" Linux. And some of those whould be repulsed at the thought of changing that. Some of my friends suggested that the reason debian was so good was that it only attracted the real geeks, i.e. those that could contribute and make it stronger.
In the end though what are computer for if not to make the live of both computer literate and illiterate easier. While it may anger some, the masses finally having access to Debian's enormous repository of packages, amoung other benefits, will be a good step forward. And a change that move Linux closer to eroding the market strangle hold that Microsoft Possesses.
Could anyone clarify how this Anaconda installer port relates to debian-installer? In particular, is it also intended to work on PowerPC?
Timeo idiotikOS et dona ferentes
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?
... and you have a /. troll!
"I'd like to put my anaconda in Portman and create progeny."
-- Dr. Eldarion --
It is different from Windows, what I said is easy to do, I've done it once :)
I don't know if you ever installed any red hat's beta release but in phoebe and severn (both using new - gtk2 anaconda) there were just nifty photos of red hat's company (building), some nature, people from red hat instead adds...
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.
Because he's l33t!!!!!!!!!!1111111111!!!!!!!!11oneoneoneoneone! !!!11!!!!!!111!
$ make love
make: don't know how to make love. Stop
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]"
www.eFax.com are spammers
Can be used on the same systems without using Alien anyways. They dont really coexist on the server, but my box handles them both flawlessly. SuSE supports APT and RPM's well. I have never had a problem with using either packaging format. Do other "commercial" distro's not do this? I know there is a big (and almost religous) argument on which is the better format, but to me, (just a user, not a developer) I dont see any difference. OTOH, I dont think having things get to standardized is a good idea. I like how some distros do some things and dont like how others do the exact same thing. It wouldn't stop me if everything was done a way I dont like it, but it would take a lot longer to get my box the way I want it.
Stop signs are only Suggestions
It helps to realize that the debian installer has been developed to work with all of Debian's supported architectures (currently 10 - i386, m68k, sparc, alpha, powerpc, arm, mips, hppa, ia64, and s390). Such an installer has to sacrifice some beauty and convenience for flexibility and power, and those of us who only compare debian's i386 installation to that of RedHat's or Suse's need to realize this. That all said, because of the overwhelming majority of debian users who only use i386 machines, it sure makes sense to me that it would be beneficial to develop a fancy i386-only installer to satisfy the masses. There are plenty of other debian-based distros who have done just that (with varying success). Perhaps this anaconda port is the beginning of just such a project.
I honestly don't know what problem people have with the Debian installer.
I had only installed distros like Red Hat and Mandrake before but I had no problem using the Debian installer.. I just made sure that I had done all the necessary things and it went fine. (Partition, format, install bootloader, etc. in no particular order)
The only real problem I had was documentation -- it sucks. I wanted to do a net install and had to fight through confusing docs until I discovered that all I had to do was download the right two disk images (the bf2.4 variety) and I was done.
From the article:
Debian variants have been created over the years; none of them has been commercially successful.
...err... does "Lindows" ring the bell?
One of the roles of a distribution is to provide cohesion between many thousands of seperately managed projects.
Distributions have policies that dictate how they achive this cohesion.
The only way to seamlessly mix debs and rpms (or other pkg format) is if they follow an identical policy.
If people turn to the LSB to provide a common policy then the LSB will effictively become a distribution.
If distributions have identical policies then they loose their individuality, and their reason to exist.
If you sacrifice the purity of a distribution you will always have to pay a price for it.
LSB isnt the answer, distributions need to be a bit different.
Diversity is a strength, but you need to recognise it.
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.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
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.
And exactly WHAT businesses do you recommend operating system software to? The business your dad runs?
What do you consider so wrong with RPM? Dependencies? Use apt-rpm, yum, or even redhat's own up2date. Have you even looked at redhat in the last 2 years?
For most businesses, debian is NOT an option. They want a company pushing the product. They want a solution...not just an operating system. They want tech support. They want to know somewhere there is a boardroom with a bunch of guys making decisions. Like it or not, those are the type of things businesses look for.
I have to say that I welcome these developments, but do not believe a merger is possible or desireable.
Debian is not defined by its technologies, but by its social contract - whch determines exactly what software and technologies can be included in the disrtibution. True, RedHat / Fedora shares a large intersection with the licensing philosophy and package base of Debian. What they do not share makes them wholly exclusive of eachother - at least from the Debian side of the picture.
This is not meant to be a damper on the technical and practical aspects of Anaconda/Apt! I am "champing at the bit" for this, myself! Think -- no more overriding dependancies after using alien - and subsequently breaking apt-get...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
They'll necessarily be taken out. Anaconda is GPL, but RedHat's trademarks are not. Fortunatly, the images are just .png loaded up from Anaconda, with the trademark images as a seperate package. Just create new ones and you're all set. Missing images don't cause big problems, they just (obviously) aren't displayed.
>... and hope to be able to allow collections of managed RPM and .deb packages to coexist side-by-side ...
I hope that all other distro creators work towards this too, so many packaging formats just confuse new Linux users, and make it even more difficult for Linux to take part in the desktop world.
While this sounds all wonderful, how's it going to work? At a binary level, you're going to find all kinds of compatibility issues that can't be addressed by dependencies or by ensuring that the package system can use any of the various package formats. For example, you've got Red Hat all but forking glibc by adding the NPTL stuff to it... people compile against that and then those binaries aren't going to work on systems that use a more standard glibc.
Furthermore, the idea of having the package system itself understand all package formats is very anti-UNIX. If anything, it should make a call to an external package translator such as alien. And given all the problems running binaries from one distro on another, this probably better not be a transparent process. Time to bring up the "big fat warning" dialog box...
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.
http://www.talknerdy.org
You're soo right.
People always say that Debian needs a graphical installer, but they never give any real reason. Is there such a huge difference between selecting my root partition with keyboard and using the mouse for that? The only thing this will add to the installer is unsupported hardware.
Also, I don't really know why I'd have to plug a mouse into my server just for the installation. I could switch to Windows or SuSE if I wanted that...
The only exclusively PowerPC GNU/Linux distro, Yellow Dog, uses the Anaconda installer in its most recent update (3.3, I think). And it is very nice. For me it bested SuSE's Yast2 as the best installer.
Yellow Dog also uses RPM binaries but includes a version of APT to manage them. They claim that the combination of APT and RPM is not original to them but was converted by a distro in Latin America - I can't remember which.
It sounds like you are getting into trouble by trying things that neither a novice nor a moderately experienced user would delve into, and which an experienced Linux sysadmin would have worked into gradually, and have no trouble with.
Do remember that Linux Is Not UNix. Being a skilled Unix sysadmin doesn't mean that you are immediately a skilled Linux sysadmin. There's a huge overlap, and there's a large number of commands that are basicaly the same with a name change. But there are some that are just different, and have a totally separate development history. grub is one of these. It started developement decades after Linux stopped looking to Unix for inspiriation. I don't know the history of lilo, but I suspect that it was developed to simplify Linux systems cohabiting with MSWind, and thus also has no similar command in Unix. So it's not surprising that being an experiences Unix admin wasn't immediate help. But if you had just stayed with the distribution's built-in installer, and not customized grub (or lilo) then you would have had no trouble.
I will admit, however, that one can easily dive in over one's head. I did that repeatedly during my first year, and still do occasionally. I frequently wish I had a spare machine to try out my wilder ideas on. Lacking that, I know I need to be conservative, or I'll get in trouble. So I *try* to remember to make my backups current before I get experimental.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Well folks, I don't know about you, but I think this is a welcome development. I have been using Red Hat for a LONG time now (>5 years), and at one point, I decided to give Debian a try, after hearing how it was supposed to be the REAL "power users" distro. Well, Debian's installer truly is horrible. Not only is it inflexible and difficult to use from the end-users' standpoint, but I understand that MOST OF ALL, it is even difficult for the Debian developers to work with.
.debs and .rpms together on all Linux systems, but I think it would be nice to see some of the best features of each packaging system melded together--maybe calling the result "dpm." (lol) Seriously; RPM has some nice features (like its TOTAL automation), and DPKG also has some nice features (like OR'd dependencies. I like the idea of that much better than RPM's file dependencies).
Personally, I think an Anaconda-based Debian installer could be a *HUGE* boom, for 3 reasons:
1) It would make Debian easier to install. In my opinion, "ease of use" != "less powerful." Even developers and power users can benefit, in my opinion, by having things be difficult just for the sake of difficulty.
2) Having a distribution-neutral Anaconda would be a huge boom for the Linux community, and potentially for strengthening the LSB.
3) I'm not so sure I like the idea of having
We all know there are plenty of dependency resolvers like APT and YUM and UP2DATE, etc.; I think these should ultimately be melded together, too. Why do we need 2 different package formats, and 3 different dependency resolvers/updaters?
Quote from Ian's announcement: "We have ported Red Hat's Anaconda installer to Debian; essentially, we replaced calls to RPM with calls to APT, and replaced Red Hat-specific configuration hooks with calls into the configlets and debconf. We have also written a tool called PickAx that facilitates the creation of Anaconda-based Debian installation CD sets. 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." Guess it answers your questions.
debconf is automatically invoked when one installs a package. Package installation is not tricky.
:which is a matter of just knowing the command, but is not any sort of trickiness.
Otherwise, debconf can be invoked with a simple command: dpkg-reconfigure
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
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
From the anaconda release notes: "The anaconda installer works on a wide variety of Linux-based computing architectures (ia32, Itanium, Alpha, S/390, PowerPC), and is designed to make it easy to add platforms."
The debconf configuration can be called up a few different ways.
Dpkg-reconfigure and gkdebconf to name a couple. IN newer versions Synaptic there is a filter that shows the packages that are managed by debconf and there is a configure button that will initiate the debconf configuration for a selected package as well.
If the utilities had an option to only show the packages managed by debconf that provide user interaction it would be better, but it is not hard to initiate the debconf configuration.
Later, Seeker
Actually Anaconda is included in the Alpha port of Red Hat and works just as well on that platform as on i386. In fact I installed RH on an Alpha just to use that tool (as I had no clue what video card was in it at the time, and I was frustrated trying to get X up in Deb), saved the XF86Config file, and used it when I replaced RH with Debian (as I much prefer it). It worked perfectly. So I think that Anaconda is just as flexible as Debian's installer, only much better. Having it available for Debian will I'm sure save me some headaches in the future.
------------------------- Thus Spoke the Mad Monkey
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.
"hd_install" command in knoppix.
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.
am i, like, the only person who liked the old one better than most other dists?
We've secretly replaced Slashdot with new Folgers Crystals - let's see if it notices.
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.
>>I frequently wish I had a spare machine to try out my wilder ideas on.
You can create a second system within your current one if you've got enough hard drive space.
See:
chroot
User Mode Linux
Hope that helps.
"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."
Have you checked out yellow dog linux? Essentially, they have ported Red Hat (including anaconda) to the PPC and from the reviews I've checked out, have done a pretty good job of it.
"Watch your cornhole, bud."
I look forward to all of this being integrated into a stable version of Debian. Shall we say, around 2008?
evanchik.net
Nope, I haven't seen yellow dog (I'm a tightwad and since Macs are waaaaaay more expensive than PCs... just kidding :). What I've seen of other arch support has been the code included in RH's anaconda (and I admit I haven't been spelunking in anaconda for about 6 months or so).
But it's good to know that I've got the option to change arch's in midstream if I wanna.
Thanks also to madmonkey for the info about Alpha support... my XL300 is still running RH 5.2, so I've only ever seen anaconda in action on x86 archs.